


go for blood

by tigerlilycorinne



Category: The Lost Boys (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Character Development, Attempted Coherency, But mostly feelings, Did I mention this is a chain of feelings?, Enemies to Lovers, Even more softness, Feelings, Fluff, Getting Together, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, LITERALLY, Listen they just love each other okay?, Literally no plot just feelings, Love Confessions, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-The Lost Boys, so many feelings, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27911083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerlilycorinne/pseuds/tigerlilycorinne
Summary: There's nothing quite like falling for a vampire you tried to kill through a series of midnight conversations at the grave where you buried him...Except maybe falling for the guy you tried to Turn through a series of midnight conversations at the grave you just crawled out of.
Relationships: David/Michael Emerson (Lost Boys), Michael Emerson/Star (Lost Boys)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 57





	1. if i'm dead to you why are you at the wake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [This_Time_I_Wont_Regret_My_Username](https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_Time_I_Wont_Regret_My_Username/gifts).



> BLUE!!! BLUE, BLUE, BLUE!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOU LOVELY HUMAN!! You're an absolute delight, a great friend, and so endlessly supportive. You are so fun and cool and kind. Truly, truly, truly, you are the best!! Thank you for existing, from the bottom of my heart.
> 
> Blue. Blue, Blue, Blue... Perhaps the least convincing lie I have ever told is, "I watched The Lost Boys because I was intrigued by the gif of the sexy sax man." The truth, of course, is this fic. "I'll write Blue 5k or so of the highly praised gay vampires!" I said.
> 
> And then something you warned me about happened: I fell in love with them. And it got a little out of hand.
> 
> I apologize for canon inconsistencies (and the typos, I finished this last night)– I tried to do my research, but I'm sure some things slipped my notice. Please forgive me.
> 
> In any case, I now adore these two, and it's entirely your fault. So here!! This fic!! It's for you!!

**MICHAEL**

Star feels different.

What does _different_ feel like?

Michael’s whole body feels loose and lazy with relief, any sense of urgency that had swept him up in the past week fading away like dew on the grass in the morning sun after a cold night. It feels like the sun has risen and it’s summer again– sweet and simple and bright. 

And under his skin, the laziness of their life itches at him– their gentle, slow nights and how easily Lucy and Sam and Grandpa fall back into their life before the Lost Boys in the span of a few days. 

It feels like he’s holding his breath for something that’s never going to come.

“What do you mean?” 

Star looks up at him, eyes sharp and searching. 

Even with her great set up– a job and an apartment and everything– Star never lets her guard down. She’s the only one who hasn’t fallen complacent. It’s why Michael kept coming back to her. 

...Isn’t it? 

“It’s just… a feeling. Don’t you feel different?” Star looks out at the sunset, and then back at him.

Michael slips his hands down to her hips. Kisses her until she gives in and stops looking at him like something might be wrong.

When he pulls back, she doesn’t look at him intently anymore, her breath soft and catching against his jaw, and he’s relieved. Even though he has nothing to hide.

He takes her in, then: her bright red lips, the steel in her eyes, her curls spilling over her shoulder, swaying in the seaside breeze. Her silhouette against the warm colors of the sunset over the ocean as they stand on the bluffs together. The utter perfection of her hits Michael with a gentle jolt, the slow stop of a Ferris wheel. She looks like a dream– the kind of girl every boy would fall over themselves to earn a smile from. He had, before.

But she’s not the one in his dreams anymore.

“Yeah,” he whispers, “I feel different.”

It is a feeling.

He remembers, faded like the distorted way an echo can remind someone, the way he felt when he first spotted her on the boardwalk what felt like a lifetime ago. This thrumming. This wild, irrational desire to get to know her, the thrilling rush of anticipation at the top of a rollercoaster, ecstatic at her first words and utterly enchanted by her smile. 

Now, kissing her neck, a new desire rises in him, darker, hazier. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants, but he wants. He remembers her in the hotel and he wants, he remembers her on the back of David’s bike and he wants, he remembers her leading him to David and the boys and he wants… he wants…

“But you’re the only one who knew them,” he murmurs. He doesn’t look at her.

The sun is down. Star’s hands find his. “I can tell you about them.”

“No.” Michael doesn’t know why he refuses. 

It’s too much to talk about them. It’s not enough. It’s too direct. It’s not the real thing; not direct enough. It’s better, he thinks, to pull her into bed and tie himself to the Lost Boys that way than to face what he wants in the daylight. 

He fumbles for her, but she catches his hands.

“Just be my friend Michael. Michael.” She looks sad for him. 

He hates it. He hates it. He’s not upset. He doesn’t need anything. He just wants her. That’s all he wants that’s all he wants that’s all– 

“Friends, Michael.” She kisses him. “Friends.”

“Star– just–” 

Star pulls away. “I need to put Laddie to bed,” she whispers. 

She’s got an apartment at the top of a nice, respectable seaside hotel where she cares for Laddie and brings Michael, sometimes. At night, when Laddie is asleep. At night, when Michael can’t stop thinking about the Lost Boys– though Star doesn’t know it. Though Michael doesn’t like to think of it.

Michael swallows and watches her go. He looks the other direction– towards the Lost Boys’ hotel– and remembers her standing in the shadows, and Paul laughing, and Marko with food, and Dwayne watching, and David’s white-blonde glinting in the firelight, and David with a low voice, and David with the bottle, and David and David and David.

He turns away, and he goes home.

He stops on the hard dirt road near the gate, dust swirling in his footsteps. He always does. 

David’s grave.

He’s buried under a tree, a scraggly, bare tree that looks sharp and ominous in the night, its leaves thinning in the end of summer.

Flat dirt, a wooden stake with _David_ scrawled on it stuck upright in the fresh dirt they threw over his body. It feels wrong– it _is_ wrong to mark his grave with a wooden stake, of all things, but they didn’t spare David too much time afterward. Everyone wanted to return to normal. Every night, after Star, Michael stops by the grave and looks at the wooden stake and feels wrong inside, at the pit of his stomach.

Tonight, it’s not there.

Tonight, the dirt is messy, sunken and scattered, and there’s a deep, human-body sized hole where the make-shift grave was. Or vampire-sized, as it were.

Fingers claw at Michael’s heart, stopping it cold in his chest. He’s weak in the knees. He’s dreaming. Isn’t he dreaming? 

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d dreamed about David.

“Michael.”

Michael whirls. 

It’s–

It’s…

It’s David.

But it’s not the David Michael has ever seen before. 

David stands covered in dirt, blood down his neck, his black leather coat gone. His hair, messy and dirty, barely glints in the strong moonlight. 

“ _Michael._ ” His soft, low, mocking voice has been warped– it’s scratchy, raw, ragged.

Michael’s nails bite into his palms. He isn’t dreaming.

David’s eyes fix, unreadable, on Michael.

David watches him, watches him, watches him. He’s unnaturally still, but then, it’s David. _It’s David._ Without a single movement, without a single word, he still looks as if he means something. 

Or maybe it’s just Michael. Maybe Michael just wants him to mean something. 

He swallows around a dry throat. “David.”

Michael is still standing in front of David’s grave, hovering like a ghost tied to the place of their passing, except that it’s David who died, and David… didn’t die. He stumbles quickly out into the road, away from the base of the tree where David is– was– buried.

David’s mouth twitches. “I’m not going back into my grave, Michael.”

Michael has spent the past few days thinking about David– the good, the bad, the inconsequential. David isn’t _good_ by anyone’s standards. Not, at least, the David that Michael was allowed to meet. 

And yet despite himself, he feels something whisper down his spine and pool in his stomach when David says his name like that. A caress, his lips and tongue around the sounds, careful and gentle, airy and entrancing. 

“You’re alive,” he says dumbly. He can’t come up with anything else at the moment.

David’s eyebrow twitches up. “Undead. You sound unreasonably happy to see me.” 

His voice is as flat as Michael remembers it. Somehow, that only adds to his relief.

“I’m not a killer if you’re alive.” Michael rushes to justify himself. But that’s not why his chest feels warm, why his heart is kicking up, pulling itself from cold terror to… something else.

“I wasn’t alive before. Are you sure killing me would have made you a killer, Michael?” David tilts his head, truly mocking him now. 

He asks like it amuses him to imagine Michael puzzling through this question. He evidently already has an opinion and is waiting to laugh at Michael, but Michael doesn’t know what that is. Somehow, he thinks that David would consider killing a vampire as murder, and yet would like nothing more than to be counted as a separate case, something different and darker and not shoved into the same category as human life. Maybe he’s wrong.

But he’s not going to give David the answer David wants– he’s done trying to _please_ David. He could never do it, anyway. 

Maybe that’s the real reason he’s given up.

“Of course,” he answers. It’s his real answer. “You had a life. I took it. That’s killing.”

David laughs at him. Of course he does. “I had a life.” He sounds immeasurably amused. “I had,” he says again, as if feeling the words in his mouth, weighing them, “A life.”

He turns away from Michael, looking up towards the tree over his grave, almost dismissive, but not quite. Michael knows he’s still in David’s periphery. Still being watched.

Michael doesn’t know what to do; what to say. David isn’t exactly trying to keep the conversation rolling, but it feels blackly wrong to just leave David here. And Michael wants to keep talking to David. He doesn’t want to stop.

David is watching him, watching him. To see if he will leave. To see if he will stay. Will David ever stop testing him? Will Michael ever stop trying to pass David’s tests?

He feels as if this moment is the moment before he plummeted off that cliff on his bike, egged on by David. Whether he keeps going where nothing good could come of it. Whether he stops while he still can.

He doesn’t even know what he would say. 

“David.”

It seems like that’s all David needs. His body twitches, and he turns the tiniest bit. Almost as if David is just as affected by his name in Michael’s mouth as the other way around. 

“Now, Michael. Don’t tell me you feel bad for me after you tried to kill me.” There’s something in his voice. Something. 

“I didn’t have a choice,” Michael shoots back. “You were trying to kill me.”

David whips around. His blue eyes burn. “I was trying to get you to _join_ me,” he hisses. As if of all the terrible things he does, of all the people he’s killed, somehow attempting to kill Michael is inconceivable– insulting to even consider.

Michael doesn’t know how to respond to the bite of David’s voice. It’s bitter and terrible. It sounds almost like hurt. 

He nods at the blood trailing down David’s neck, and remembers the first time he saw David feed– David had been the cleanest of all the Lost Boys, blood nowhere but on his lips. Michael remembers, shamefully, wanting to lick them clean. And only partially because he needed blood.

“Killing anyone tonight?”

David looks as if he’s been slapped, but when he speaks, he’s returned to his low, knowing voice. “It’s not so bad of a thing. You get used to it, Michael. You would get used to it, if you joined me.”

Michael grits his teeth. It’s hard, so hard, to even wrap his mind around David. Completely uncaring of human life. Matter-of-fact, even amused, enjoying it. 

“And that’s why I’ll never join you.”

He turns to the house. 

It’s late, and the moon is out, and Lucy will be wondering–

He’s thrown back, shoved against the tree over David’s grave. The impact knocks the breath out of him, and the tree shivers above him and leaves flutter down.

David is furious, and it is terrifying. His features haven’t changed, but his eyes have gone yellow and his fangs have popped. Michael’s too shocked to even struggle against David, who’s pinning him against the tree with a fist in his collar. 

“You think you’re so much better than us,” he spits. “So _good_. Up there on your moral fucking high ground.” His words are angry, but his voice shakes. “You and those _bastards_ came after us first. You _killed Marko_. And then you killed the rest of us. You” –his voice pitches– “You were going to kill _me_. You’re going to lecture me, Michael? You?”

David’s breath is cold against Michael’s cheek. If Michael turned his head and leaned forward one inch, they’d be kissing. 

He’s not going to do that. 

His heart thuds in his chest, and he swallows his protest, or David might tear him apart right here.

He reaches up to where David’s hand clutches at him and gently wraps his hand around it. He’s never touched David gently like this. He remembers David wearing leather gloves, black, black. He’s so pale now, without his gloves, without his jacket. So cold. “David,” he whispers softly, and nothing else.

David’s eyes flash when he realizes Michael isn’t going to do anything. His eyelashes are so light blond, in the moonlight they might as well be white. 

When he breathes, Michael can feel it against his chest. 

He says, “David.”

And then his eyes turn blue again, and his fangs draw in. Michael watches them, and he knows David is watching him watch. 

Still carefully, he pulls David’s hand off of him. David hasn’t provoked him– he’s provoked David. He feels strangely triumphant. 

He meets David’s eyes, still holding his cold hand, until David stumbles back, muttering _“Fuck,_ ” so softly Michael isn’t sure he was meant to hear it.

“David.” Michael’s hand feels empty. Too warm. He misses, somehow, the chill of David’s.

“Stop,” David says– he sounds ragged, and Michael can’t see his face. “Stop fucking saying my name.”

He turns away fully this time. 

Michael dismissed.

The next night, Michael and Star fall into bed. Laddie sleeps in the second bedroom and Star makes sure they’re both quiet. If Michael seems both desperate and distracted, Star doesn’t say anything. 

“I’m going to find a man one of these days, Michael,” she says instead. “You’ll have to let me.”

“Do whatever you want,” Michael mutters. “Let’s keep doing this until you do.”

“Okay.” Star’s body gleams in the moonlight. She’s warm. She’s gentle. She’s never killed anyone. “Only if you want to.”

Michael grabs his jacket. “I do.”

Star just looks at him. “Do you?”

Michael puts on his jacket and doesn’t answer. The seaside breeze will be cold tonight. “Do vampires get cold?”

“They’re not so different than us.”

Michael decides that’s a _yes_.

It’s cold outside, save for the circles of warmth bonfires provide. David’s coat was gone the last night Michael saw him. It’s cold outside. 

Michael follows the path home.

And against all rational thought, he finds his way back to David’s grave.

He doesn’t know what he expected– David wouldn’t get back in his grave. But David is there, sitting on the lowest branch of the tree and curled up with his arms around his knees, staring out at the Emerson house. He looks seventeen. A lost boy.

“David.”

David starts, and Michael wonders what he was thinking about deeply enough that he didn’t hear Michael approach, even with his vampire hearing.

David lets his legs drop down and regards Michael from up in the tree. He doesn’t say anything, and Michael realizes with a strange twist in his gut that he was hoping David would say Michael’s name in return.

Michael shrugs off his jacket. “Cold?” He doesn’t know what he’s doing, only that he doesn’t want to walk away. David isn’t sending him off this time, he decides. He doesn’t even think David wanted to send him off last time, not really.

David sneers. “I’m a vampire.”

“Do vampires not get cold?” Michael internally curses Star, and then takes it back. Star is the one perfect thing in his life– even if he finds he’s not searching for perfect after all.

There’s a scrape of bark, and then David lands soundlessly on the ground beside Michael. “Offering your jacket, Michael, is not what someone usually does when they’ve almost killed someone.”

“Don’t want it?”

There’s a pause. David studiously looks away. His black T-shirt is ripped, and his arms are as pale as the moon. He looks… fragile, and Michael wants– unreasonably– to pull David into the circle of his arms and cradle him. David would eat him alive if he knew Michael was thinking it.

“My fucking clothes are in the hotel.”

Michael realizes that David isn’t going to take the jacket, or say that he wants it. His avoidance of rejecting it is answer enough.

He puts the leather jacket around David’s shoulders and straightens it. “Better?”

“Nothing like mine,” David grumbles, but he doesn’t make any move to shrug it off. His eyes are so blue, almost gray-blue. His lips don’t have a speck of blood on them. 

Michael stops looking at David’s lips. His eyes… there’s something in them. Something like feeling. 

“David.” 

Something flickers in David’s eyes, and David looks away almost hurriedly. His throat bobs. 

Michael pushes onward. “I’m sorry about the boys.”

David’s head shoots up, and he stares at Michael with a look of pure disbelief for a moment before his even expression returns. Michael feels rather accomplished. 

“We hurt Marko before you hurt us. That was… wrong, and I’m sorry.” He wants to say _it hurt you, and I’m sorry for that too,_ but he can’t get the words out. Perhaps it’s only self-preservation; if he spoke the words out loud, he doubts the response would be positive.

David blows out a breath. He’s still as a statue. “Who would’ve thought.” He smiles, cruel and cold, and catches Michael’s eye. “If you’re expecting a heartfelt apology from me in return, you can keep waiting.”

 _Really?_ _What the hell, David?_ Michael’s gut flips, coils, black and angry. “Killing anyone tonight?”

David tips his head back and laughs. The line of his throat draws Michael’s eyes. And Michael’s not a vampire anymore. “No. But if I was hungry, I would. Maybe one of your Frogs.” He grins, angry, feral.

“Right. Bye David.”

“Don’t come back,” David calls after him, gripping Michael’s jacket in spite of his words.

“Not planning to,” Michael replies.

But he goes back. 

Of course he goes back. 

Star is clearly concerned. “The closest Chinese? Why, I don’t know, there’s one a few blocks from here. Why?”

Michael rubs his eyes and looks out the window, trying to see if he can spot the place from up in the apartment, looking out at the cold. He’ll have to get a new jacket, too. “No reason,” he says. And then, “Do they take orders this late?”

They do.

_Tell me Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?_

“Hungry?” Michael finds David still lurking out around the bottom of his tree. 

Why David stays around here, Michael can’t fathom, but he’s relieved that David hasn’t disappeared. Irrationally relieved, relieved of something he shouldn’t even have been afraid of, and still something he spent most of his day fearing. That something would happen to David. 

“Hungry?” David eyes him and the plastic bags he’s carrying. “For human food?”

Michael shrugs. “Yeah. You don’t just live off of blood, do you?”

The plastic bites against Michael’s hand, and he sets the bag down. David watches him, watches him. Closes his eyes, opens them again, and smiles as if to himself. Amused and a little of something else. 

“No, that’s impossible.” David reaches out to accept Michael’s offered box. “But I can take care of myself, Michael.” He peeks. “Is this a tribute?”

Michael shrugs again. He doesn’t want David to take care of himself. He wants, he realizes with a trickle of shame, for David to need him. Or else what would keep David coming back?

They eat their Chinese. 

“Are your parents really hippies, or did you just say that to talk to a girl?”

Michael almost spills the noodles all over his lap. David is talking to _him_ , and it takes him a moment for him to even gather his mind enough to realize what David said. “Did she tell you about that?” He hopes the moonlight isn’t strong enough to catch the flush of his cheeks; he can feel them warming.

If he notices, David doesn’t seem affected. “No, Michael.” His expression suggests Michael has said something humorous, but his voice is as flat as ever. “I watched you for much longer than you knew.”

Sweet, syrupy warmth floods through Michael like hot melted chocolate out of an upset pot– it will leave a stain, but it is so good. Watching him. David was watching him. For Max, but still. David. His eyes on Michael, watching, watching, watching.

“My mom is a bit of a hippie, but my dad not so much,” Michael admits now, poking at his noodles, unable to meet David’s eyes. 

David’s gaze always feels as if it could pierce right through him and read the inside of his heart as if the words were carved out on his face, and Michael doesn’t think David would want to read what he has right now. 

“He was when they met, but I think he got too interested in the corporate side of things.” Michael looks sideways at David, and then away, because David is looking right back. When their eyes catch, something flutters in Michael’s stomach. “It depends on your definition of a hippie, I guess.” He shakes his head. “Hippies.”

He means it as a rueful failure to connect with the generation, and then he realizes that for all he knows, David could be their generation too, or older.

He cannot believe he hasn’t thought of it before. David, immortal and ever-young, knowing and watching and living in the very underbelly of life. He can imagine David knowing everything. He can imagine David a century old or more; it almost feels right, because then David would be inevitable. Either David was never supposed to happen at all, or he was inevitable. Or perhaps once David happened even though he wasn’t supposed to, he was inevitable.

“Yes, Michael?” David’s grey eyes dance, and the corner of his mouth looks like it might smirk. “Admiring my use of chopsticks?”

Michael wonders if it would be a worthy mission to try coaxing out one of those grins he’d flash Michael, back when the Lost Boys were alive and laughing with him. Yes, Michael decides, warmth blooming in his chest, it would.

Chopsticks…? 

_Oh._ Michael flushes. He’d been staring. David’s eyes laugh at him, but there’s almost a warmth to it– or is it Michael’s wishes only? “I was wondering,” he confesses, “How long you’ve been around.”

David’s expression falters for a split second, and it looks like genuine surprise– even gratification. But all he says is, “Einstein did say time is relative.”

 _Stop being an enigma and let me know you_ , Michael begs him, only of course he doesn’t say it. Instead, he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Give me a hint, come on. Older or younger than Einstein?” It’s the first name that comes to mind.

“ _Younger_.” David looks disgusted at the suggestion. “Einstein was born in the eighteen hundreds, Michael.” He seems to love saying Michael’s name.

Michael lets out a laugh of pure shock. It’s so _human_ , that expression of disgust. For a moment he feels as if he’s having a conversation with someone who trusts him. “What about my mom?”

As soon as he asks it, he’s not sure if he wants to hear the answer– it’s almost gross if you think about it too hard like that– although _what’s_ gross? Michael thinks– whatever Michael thinks and wants are certainly not relevant.

Still, it’s a relief when David smiles, the sly sort of glee Michael hasn’t seen since Before. “I’m young, Michael. Young enough.”

He says it significantly, but Michael doesn’t know what it means. All he knows is that David’s a magnet. 

David hands him back the empty box. Michael wants to laugh out loud. David kills people with obvious enjoyment, but he will not litter? Or maybe he just wants to make Michael do something for him, like a subordinate. Like one of his boys.

Michael thinks the second is the most likely, but he takes it anyway.

“I should’ve made you see maggots again.” David nods to the carton that held rice, snickering.

Michael feels anger like the spill of blood, just a drop. “Killing anyone tonight?”

A ghost of a smile plays on David's lips. “I’ll drink ‘em dry,” he whispers into the night air. The breeze seems to play with his words, floating them around Michael.

Michael feels sick. The magic and the magnetism disappear in a flash, a magician’s trick finished. He must go pale– he can feel the shiver down his spine and the blood and heat drain from his face. Again, again, again. Another life, and another, and another. David watches him, watches him, watches him. 

And then David looks away. “You should be surprised every time,” he mutters. “It’s getting old.”

“I’m never,” Michael says again, remembering David’s fist in his collar, the cold skin of his hand as Michael slowly freed himself, “going to get used to it.”

“Go on, then,” David croons, waving down the road. “Off to your perfect family of perfect angels with perfect morals. Shoo.”

Michael, too tired for a fight and all the cardboard cartons packed up in the plastic bag, goes.

The days seem to slip by like the slow, sweet drizzle of honey– the laughing kids on the beach, Lucy at her new job, Sam with his comics and the Frog brothers, ice-cream sundaes with Star at midday. 

It comes to a sharp, slicing stop when night falls, and he makes his way to the tree. 

Suddenly, time no longer flows. 

Instead, Michael is seizing it, trying to make it stop, trying to drag it out, to make the most of the isolated moments he spends with David until it passes joltingly. 

One moment lasts minutes as he drinks David in, one blink and they’ve already had a whole conversation and the entire interaction is gone and passed.

Over and over again. David and his low, lilting voice, the curl of his mouth around Michael’s name, the flicker of his smile that Michael works so hard to coax out. They talk only about the things David wants to talk about: mostly Michael, but occasionally David. Flashes of David– one thing he did one time. Never any of the other Lost Boys.

The tiniest glimpse of feeling David shows. Now– gone again– back again– gone. An emotion Michael can never pin before David has wiped his expression clean. 

Michael finds that chasing it is the only thing he wants to do. The slow, sweet flow of honeyed days, the rushing, crashing river and night pulling him over the edge of the waterfall. He wants to fall. 

Lucy thinks it’s Star, and Sam thinks it’s Star, and Star doesn’t know what to think, she says, what’s gotten into him?

He feels, he says to Star, different.


	2. you know i didn't want to have to haunt you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David continues to meet Michael by the tree, misses Paul and Marko and Dwayne, and damn near invents yearning.

**DAVID**

Michael was at David’s grave the first night David crawled up.

It wasn’t fate, but it felt like it.

David emerged, hungry, desperately hungry, like a butterfly from a cocoon. Feeling fragile, and wet-winged, not yet ready to fly, but achingly, yawningly hungry in the low clench of his stomach, in the fangs already pushing against his lips uncalled for. 

The first time he lost control was so long ago he can barely remember it.

Killed, killed, killed. One, two, three. 

Who the hell had buried him with a stake over his grave, he’d like to know. Right by the Emerson’s– fools, they all were. Couldn’t they see the antlers hadn’t gone through his heart? Fools. 

Foolish, bright Lucy. Foolish, horrible, hapless Sam who had drawn in the Frog brothers to kill his boys. 

The _fucking Frog brothers_. Those stupid kids, who David has thought about many times. Snapping their necks, drinking them dry, drinking them alive, staking them through the heart just like they did to his own boys. They weren’t even _good_ , those bastards, but they were prepared.

David stares down at the bleeding corpse and feels like screaming. 

Sam and those boys who didn’t know a thing, killing vampires because David’s kind _had_ to kill. 

Foolish Michael, who didn’t realize what David was until it was too late. Foolish Michael, who trusted David, who believed David was good, who wanted to be David’s friend, who wanted trusted believed–

The man whimpers on the cold pavement and David lets his fangs come out again– it’s the Emersons’ fault for burying him alive, now he’s hungry, hungry, hungry.

He snaps the neck. Third kill. 

If the boys were here, they might share. Or they might laugh and kill someone new for themselves. It would depend on what mood Dwayne was in, and whether Paul and Marko were full enough to go have fun by themselves.

Anger burns coldly in between his ribs. If the boys were here, they’d hold him as he shakes now on the ground, having lost control. He never loses control. Sometimes Dwayne would go a few days without in order to lose control; he reveled in it. But David never lost control, and his boys never let him.

If he could just get himself under control– but there’s no getting him back under control when he’s this hungry. 

Hungry and empty and hollow.

In the growl of his stomach.

In the call of his chest, in his heart.

Michael, standing by his grave, the dirt clawed up. David, just back from three consecutive kills, still wrangling his control, trying to settle himself and the new blood rushing in his veins.

When he sees Michael, it’s like the world stops. When he sees Michael, it’s like a new life shudders in him, one that has nothing to do with the lives he just took, it shudders in him and it calls as pitifully as a wounded animal in a trap. Michael, the trap. When he sees Michael, he is all of a sudden tired of being alone for even a moment.

He sees Michael, and it feels like fate, and he finds it in him to gather up the animal inside of him and shove it deep, deep down through sheer force of will, when he sees Michael.

“Michael,” he says. He sounds like worship. When it comes to Michael, he has always sounded like worship. “ _Michael_.” It’s the only thing worth saying.

And that is how it happens, the first time. Michael’s name, and then they are talking. He is talking to Michael, and he never has before. Not like this. Not with Michael talking back instead of demanding to know what is going on or _where is Star, where is Star._

David had hated Michael because Star met Michael and no longer wanted to kill him, turning all of David’s plans on their heads. And then he had met Michael and he had hated Star, he had hated her, even though she didn’t deserve it. 

Paul and Marko were about fun– Marko coyly so and Paul shameless; Dwayne was about getting things done when everyone else wasted time. And Star was about herself. She clutched at who she was and kept it close. Star had caught Michael’s eye and David wished more than anything he hadn’t lost sight of who he was decades ago.

_Where is Star, where is Star? What is happening, where is Star? What’s going on, David?_

And now Michael is talking to David. He is saying David had a life, he is saying he didn’t have a choice and he had to kill David, he is saying so many things. 

David is… angry. David is _angry_. He has hunted for the first time without the Lost Boys in a very long time and he has lost control and he has come back to find wild broken in his chest, and Michael expects him to be sane. He hasn’t felt such roaring, rushing– _human–_ emotion in so long, not like this. Everything felt never-ending and easy, years upon years. 

Michael is against the tree, and David is against Michael, and Michael is so warm, and suddenly their hands are touching. Michael’s skin is so warm, rough from work and solid, and his hand curls around David’s as gently as a lover’s touch. And suddenly, David is not angry anymore. 

Suddenly, he is afraid. 

He should’ve killed Michael himself, the moment Michael stumbled into his life, yanked unceremoniously by David’s schemes, and a spark lit inside David, lit and burned. Vampires are flammable. He will burn to the ground under this feeling in his chest.

_He is afraid, he is so afraid._

David’s life has gone on and on, around like a carousel, and Michael has thrown a wrench in the gears.

 _David_ , Michael is saying. 

He is saying David’s name.

He races himself that night, trying to chase the same rushing feeling he got when talking to Michael. Trying to bring it back without involving Michael at all. Trying to break free.

But no matter how fast he pushes his bike or how much sand he can throw on his turns, no matter how high he can fly over bumps or how small he can make the angle between his bike and the ground when he turns, it’s not the same. 

It’s not the same without the boys betting against him, challenging him, beating him or losing to him, racing across the beach together. 

It’s not the same as the wild inside of him when Michael looks him in the eyes, dark blue like sea glass at night, the kind that Marko might put on an earring, if it was sharp enough.

His bike cannot beat a sea of loneliness.

David will keep his distance. 

_David will keep his distance._

And Michael is not looking for David anyway; his grave is only on Michael’s way home, that is all.

But after a lonely, sleeping day in the shadow of an overhanging cliff, David wakes and goes to the place where he was buried. The stake is still there. _David_ , it reads. He does not know if it is Michael’s handwriting; he does not know Michael’s handwriting. He does not want to. He wants to stay away.

But he is here.

The tree branches are hard, the rough bark scraping against David’s hands as he settles himself and looks out at the Emerson house. Is Michael already home? Did he miss Michael?

But no, Michael is saying his name.

Michael apologizes, and David almost falls apart. 

He thinks of Marco and Dwayne and Paul, and their midnight revelry and their hunts. Laughter and sex, if they all got very drunk– on liquor or blood, it didn’t matter– now they are gone. For one flashing moment, David hates Michael. In the next, he doesn’t.

Michael apologizes about the Lost Boys. He does not apologize for trying to kill David. Perhaps he does not regret it.

Michael apologizes and David thinks of all the things he’s done wrong and all the things he’s done to Michael and all the reasons why it is not Michael’s fault and Michael apologizes.

David does not.

“Killing anyone tonight?”

He wants to. Killing is lonely and terrible without anyone with him, and the Frog brothers are so overconfident, they have forgotten to be careful. He avoids their store carefully, because if he ever got near, he would burn it to the ground.

Michael’s jacket around his shoulders. The outside is black and tough but the inside is soft, and David thinks it must suit him, although he can’t see himself in a mirror. 

It smells like Michael, young and soapy, aftershave and cologne and sunshine muffled in leather. When Michael is gone, David presses his face into it and breathes.

The jacket is warm. A little big, but warm.

David doesn’t feel hungry– or maybe he doesn’t feel like killing. It’s not a big deal if killing isn’t desirable to him anymore. It is only a mood. Isn’t it? It is only a mood. Paul is not here to whoop and crow, Marko is not here to grin and lift his chin and point, and Dwayne is not here to get them going, climbing onto the bike with a dark smile.

No one is here to set the mood or start the mood or get the mood going, and last time David killed all on his own, his victims were the only victims, their screams the only screams, and the rush in his veins was only blood, not adrenaline or joy or delight. 

He doesn’t need to feed every night anyway, although he hasn’t thought about it in terms of need in a long, long time. He doesn’t need to feed tonight.

And he does not want to.

Instead of the warmth of blood, he pulls the sleeves of Michael’s jacket over his hands.

It is warm.

Chinese.

David does not know when he fell, only that suddenly he is falling farther, and he is already so far down. So deep.

Chinese. 

What keeps Michael coming back? The grave is on Michael’s way home. What keeps David coming back? 

Michael shrugs. He looks better without the jacket. He would look better with nothing on at all.

What keeps David coming back indeed.

Parents and hippies. 

Hell, David is fucked. David is f a l l i n g. It is a dream, it is a dream. It is not the nightmare David felt like he was living at the very beginnning and it is not the timeless Vegas feel of aimless thrill and gamble he felt after. It is the feeling of a dream, and Michael in the moonlight, and it is Michael’s pinked cheeks and sideways glance, and it is Michael talking to David and the second-grader rush of adrenaline David gets in starting the conversation this time.

It is _How long have you been around?_

And it is _young enough for you._

But he does not say _for you_.

“Killing anyone tonight?”

Michael looks so horrified. _I’m never going to get used to it._

David feels sick.

David pulls Michael’s jacket closer, but when Michael leaves, he feels cold all over again.

He is killing tonight. He has not found a girl to flirt with, a guy to piss off. He has not gotten a speeding ticket or made a cop angry. He has not been on the boardwalk because he just hasn’t felt like it, and now he doesn’t have any enemies to kill.

The Frog brothers, but Michael would never speak to him again if he killed the Frog brothers.

But he is cold, and he must feed.

Despite his promise not to, Michael comes back.

David is so relieved he could cry. He is so relieved, it scares him. Michael is nothing to be afraid of; Michael is kind and good, and he keeps coming back to help David. He cannot hurt David. Not physically.

But he can hurt David more than David has ever hurt before. 

Inside. In his cold, undead heart with someone else’s blood flowing through it.

Michael can hurt that.

And David is afraid.

It isn’t his fear, though, that makes it happen.

Their next conversation is their longest, and their worst. 

It is the only time David tries to offer conversation to Michael after all the conversations Michael has given him, but he has already ruined that by the time he offers it.

David has killed someone and he is _so tired_ of killing alone, so tired of having no one with him as he does the deed, filling his veins with the blood they need, so tired so tired so angry. So angry because the boys are gone, and he wants to cry. This is anger? This is anger. This is grief? Maybe. He is furiously heartbroken, and someone told him once that sometimes big things take a long time to sink in. 

The boys are gone.

Dwayne is gone, and Paul is gone, and Marko is gone. If they could see David without them, they would laugh, and kill him. 

Always coming back to Michael. Always coming back to Michael. 

They would never forgive him.

The Lost Boys are gone and they are not coming back, and David returns to the tree above his grave, hoping he does not have any tears on his face.

And Michael comes back with a hickey.

No, it isn’t his fear that makes it happen.

It is the last part of his rational mind. The part that has all but deserted David in Michael’s presence. The shape of Michael in a T-shirt, the fullness of Michael’s lips, the solid line of his jawline in the moonlight; these are the things that crash through David like a tidal wave, sweeping away his rational thought.

But the last of this reason shouts.

Michael cannot stand David wanting Michael, even if he does not know that David does. Michael cannot stand him being a creature of the night. Michael cannot stand him staining his perfect daytime life with secrets. Michael cannot stand him killing people.

Michael cannot stand him.

And David must kill people. He cannot change that he is a creature of the night, or that he is not a woman like Star.

And they boys would hate him if they saw him now.

So it is not David’s fear that causes him to lash out at the weakest spot he can find in Michael. It is not David’s fear that drives Michael away.

It is pure logic.

It cannot work.

David will not try to force it.

And when he no longer has to deal with Michael, no longer needs to see him; the hiccup in David’s life is gone. The wrench is removed from the gears. He is not afraid of Michael anymore, because he will not see Michael anymore. 

Michael cannot hurt him. 

David is not afraid.

It.

Is. 

Not.

David’s.

Fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse my ever-shifting writing style.


	3. even on my worst day, did i deserve babe, all the hell you gave me?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael is so over David's unfriendliness, and his blue eyes, and the way he looks in the moonlight. He definitely is. He's so done. Isn't he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, all the chapter titles are from Taylor Swift's "my tears ricochet". Listen to the song and tell me to my face it wasn't written specifically for Michael and David.

**MICHAEL**

“Star.”

She is warm and kind and forgiving. She listens to Michael, and she cares about Michael. Her mouth latches onto his neck, and there are no fangs.

David doesn’t care about Michael.

And Michael keeps going back anyway. Why? He doesn’t know. He really doesn’t know.

Star draws him close. She’s so very different from David. David never wants to touch Michael– shies away from Michael’s touch like it's poison and hates Michael saying his name. He looks like he wants to run from Michael and never come back.

“What is it, Michael?” Star’s hands map him. “You look upset.”

“I’m not upset,” Michael says instantly. 

“Worried.” She’s off of him, now, turning on the light to illuminate her mussed bed and neatly organized room, a set of drawers, a closet, the doorway to the second bedroom where Laddie sleeps. It looks so normal here, nothing like the mess that Michael feels like he’s living in.

“Not worried,” Michael assures her. “Definitely not worried.” 

Star is studying him. Not the way David does, curious and amused and a touch malicious, but gently and full of care, almost like a mother. “Have you met someone?”

“No,” Michael denies vehemently.

David’s lips, covered in blood, and Michael’s stomach, jolting low and wanting, cry out in protest.

“Definitely not,” he adds, to make it absolutely clear.

Star sighs. “You’re thinking about the boys.” It isn’t a question.

At least she doesn’t know which one, or what he was thinking about them. “Did they keep a lot of things down in that hotel?”

Star sits up. “Michael, they lived there.” She tilts her head a little, as if looking past him, her voice strong but still sad. Wistful, almost, a runaway from a place she can’t help but miss even after choosing to leave. “They covered that place in stuff– oh, all sorts of stuff,” she says when Michael raises his eyebrows. “I guess you didn’t notice when you came down.” 

She doesn’t mention what they did there, or how frantic and distracted and afraid he was. How he couldn’t have noticed anything at that moment.

David scowls in Michael’s mind, his pale skin, the cold air, his blond hair in the moonlight. _My fucking clothes are in the hotel._ David hasn’t gone back, then. To the hotel. 

It must be too painful, with all his memories of the Lost Boys, but it’s strange to imagine David truly caring for anyone. Perhaps, Michael thinks bitterly, it’s only because David has never cared for him. He feels irrationally jealous– he has no place wishing he could be someone who is dead.

“Do vampires have to kill when they feed?” he asks. It’s a question torn out of him from the very eye of the storm in his heart, something he hadn’t ever meant to make it out of his mouth. Thrown out into the world through the force of the winds.

Star opens her mouth. Closes it. “No,” she says carefully. She looks like she’s on the edge of solving a puzzle, a puzzle Michael doesn’t want her to solve. “Not necessarily.”

“So David just loved killing.”

Star starts. “He didn’t _love_ killing.” She seems shocked Michael could even think of it. “He enjoyed– but he never _loved_ killing.”

“Never when?” Michael finds himself saying. “You barely knew him either, Star.”

She looks hurt. “I miss him too, you know. In my own way.” 

“Nevermind,” Michael cuts her off quickly. He doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

David and his Lost Boys, dead, bloodless bodies in their wake. 

David and his Lost Boys. 

David.

“Would David mind if I went down and took some of his things to him?” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

Star pulls away from him quickly, as if suspecting he already has and he has taken the aura of death that haunts the hotel with him. “To David’s grave, you mean?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.” God. Oh, God. “I just thought if David was alive he might mind me going through his things.”

Star stares at him for a long, long moment. “But he’s not alive,” she says. Carefully, as if testing the words. Dipping her toes into the water to feel the temperature, as if she doesn’t already know it’s cold, cold, cold. “David isn’t alive.”

“No, of course not,” Michael says. “David is dead. David isn’t alive. I ki– David is dead.” He can’t get the word out. _Killed_. _I nearly killed him_.

The bedclothes rustle, but Star isn’t looking at Michael, so Michael doesn’t look at Star. Star doesn’t even put her clothes on to look out the window; they’re high up, anyway, and from here you can see the shoreline and the beach and the bonfires. You can see the trail that leads to the sunken hotel.

“I know you feel guilty.”

He opens his mouth to deny it–

“I can _feel_ it, Michael.” She shakes her head, her curls tangled down her back, swaying. Michael wishes he could still be enchanted by them, instead of– instead of by _him_. “What else could you have done? They would have slaughtered your family, killed them all.” 

Michael feels like he can’t breathe all over again. “Was David always so terrible?”

She turns, a shadow on her face, moonlight outlining her from where it pours from the window. “David isn’t around to mind if you go down there,” Star tells him, “And that’s good. Because if he were alive without his boys, he would become even more terrible in his grief. No one would make it out alive.” She sounds sorry for it.

Michael swallows. _No one would make it out alive._ But David hasn’t killed anyone who was involved. Not Sam, or Lucy, or Grandpa. Not even the Frog brothers, who orchestrated the whole thing, though he made a terrible joke about drinking them once. 

David hasn’t touched them. Why hasn’t he?

“Are you sure?” Michael presses. “He wouldn’t pick kills for revenge.”

Star shakes her head. She shakes her head around Michael so much lately, as if he’s getting everything wrong. Maybe he is. He feels as if everyone is celebrating a passed test and he’s still staring at his work, and the answer isn’t even one of the options. David is supposed to be dead.

“When David loved someone, he really loved them.” Star’s smile is bittersweet. “He loved his Lost Boys.”

Oh boy, they’re talking about love. He and Star, they’re talking about David and love. David’s love. Oh, fuck.

“Anyway.” Star’s bittersweet smile has dropped. “He’s killed cops who gave him parking tickets before. You’d be dead, Michael.”

She says his name so differently than the way David does. David’s mouth drifts over the sounds as if to send them out completely untouched; Star says it as if clipping the edges, catching on the C. 

_You’d be dead, Michael_.

She sees something on his face.

“Michael.” His name again. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Oh no. “Nothing. Definitely nothing.” Michael is suddenly made out of jelly. “I’m not keeping anything from you, Star. I love you. Why would I keep anything from you?”

He immediately realizes he shouldn’t have said it. _I love you_. It’s a clear sign of panic; her red mouth parts open. 

“Why are you asking about David?” She doesn’t move from the window. She looks like she couldn’t move if she tried. 

That makes two of them.

“No reason.”

“And where did your jacket go? Vampires don’t really feel the cold, Michael. Did you give it to him?” Star looks at Michael, her face slowly getting paler by the moment. He can see the reality trickling into her, like the sand in an hourglass slowly draining.

 _They don’t?_ Then why did David take it? 

He asks neither. He says, “To who?”

Star closes her eyes. “David is alive, isn’t he? He’s around to mind if you go to the hotel–”

“I have to go, Star.”

Her eyes open. “Will he talk to me? I can’t believe– will he see me?”

Cold pools in Michael’s stomach. It feels like dread. The selfish, animal dread of having something taken from you that you didn’t even need, but that was all yours. He doesn’t want to share David.

“I have to go, Star.”

“Is that why you leave early now?” Star’s voice is high when she’s agitated, different from the resonant tones that drew Michael in when they first met.

“I have to be home.”

Michael can’t get Star’s words out of his head on the way home. He doesn’t really know what David gets up to, now that he thinks of it, and though David is as sharp as a knife, he isn’t a ruthless menace the way Star seems to expect him to become. 

He wonders what keeps David tied to his humanity.

Maybe it is only that he stays away from the hotel, and so never triggers the grief, never opens the floodgates– or maybe it is something else. 

Even if David misses things he can’t bring himself to fetch, Michael doesn’t go down to see if there’s something he can bring back; he’s not sure whether David would take it without a word and never speak of it again (meaning he’s grateful) or tear into Michael within an inch of his life.

Instead: “Do you sleep somewhere safe?”

David’s eyes flash and he flies down from the tree. Evidently, he’d been watching Michael come down the road, and his eyes stay fixed on Michael. They slip down to Michael’s neck, and his face twists.

“Make up your mind, Michael.” He’s sharp tonight.

“Do you?”

“I thought you weren’t coming back.” He’s wearing Michael’s jacket, zipped up to the top of his throat. Blood on his lips. Still looking at Michael’s neck. The branches of the tree above him cast stripes of shadow over his face.

“I’m asking if you have a place to stay.” Michael had been looking forward to– or not looking forward to, but anticipating– this all day, and now that David’s in such a terrible mood, he doesn’t want to be here at all.

David looks at him flatly. “Do you think I’m going to stay in the hotel with them gone?”

Michael’s heart gives a pang, despite his promise to himself. Strictly business. That’s it. Just making sure David has what he needs. He can’t imagine David alone– now that he thinks of it, David has always had company. 

He’s a people person, David. 

Michael looks at the slope of David’s shoulders– close and tight, no matter how he tries to stand evenly. He’s a people person who has always had people until now. 

He doesn’t think David is without fault, but he still feels guilty that he’s gotten off with everyone he cares about still alive– Lucy, Sam, Grandpa, Star, even the ridiculous Frog brothers. Even _David_ is alive. 

(Which doesn’t mean he cares about David. Just a note: also, David is alive. He does… care for David though. Fuck, he does.)

Michael thinks of storming off– and then he thinks of David in the cold, spending the night who-knows-where. Alone, alone, alone.

“Where do you go?” Michael asks. 

David tips his head up to the moon. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

His heart throbs.

Oh God, he cares about David.

Oh God, oh God.

David and his smile, David and his clever eyes, David and his soft, mocking voice. He thought it was only lust. 

It’s not, it’s not.

“Stay with me, then,” he offers, unable to believe the words coming out of his mouth. “Stay at our place.”

He doesn’t realize until he says it how much he wants it to happen. Wants to see David in the mornings, and laugh with him in the night. 

Good God. 

It doesn’t matter, anyway, because David’s eyes drop from the moon to Michael. To his neck, and up again. Looks him dead in the eye. “The house they died in. The house you _killed them_ in?”

Michael flinches. “You didn’t give us much of a choice.”

“Do you think we had a choice either? To kill?” His voice is still musing. “We have to _feed_ , Michael. I’ve done nothingwrong.”

Michael stares at him. “You’re kidding,” he says incredulously. “Nothing? You’re joking.”

David’s eyes flash yellow. He walks closer. Slow. Though he’s shorter than Michael, he feels as if he’s looming, the shadow of the grim reaper, the dark shape of a dark and twisted tragedy. 

“Invite me in, Michael.” He speaks the words mockingly, dangerously– mocking what, Michael isn’t sure. Michael’s hope, Michael’s naivete. “Invite me in, and I’ll tear your brother’s throat out for what he did.”

 _Sam._

Michael’s heart screams. 

Blood rushes in his ears. 

“I’ll drink him empty, and you can find the body shrivelled up like a raisin on the bedroom floor.” David’s fangs are out. He licks his lips.

_Blood on his lips. Blood._

Michael shoves David backwards. His own jacket on David’s shoulders is cold in the night air. 

“Don’t you dare touch him.” Michael punches David, hard. He hasn’t been this furious in what feels like forever. “Don’t you dare, do you hear me?”

Cold, cold. David will be cold and alone, and maybe he’ll not have a place to sleep, and the sunlight will get him. 

_Good fucking riddance._

David doesn’t respond. He’s not even trying to fight back, not really. Just catching the blows as they come, softening them. His nose is bleeding. Michael isn’t sure why it’s such a shock to see David bleed. His blood looks like a darker red than the blood that runs in Michael’s veins, but in the dark of the night, he can’t be sure.

“Fuck.” Michael swipes his bloody knuckles on his shirt. “What am I even doing here? Fuck.”

He’s over it.

He’s just.

Over it.

David, who laughs at him and takes Michael utterly for granted, and threatens to kill his _fucking brother_.

He doesn’t take his jacket back; he just walks off. The gate’s around the corner.

It’s cold down the road, even though it’s a summer night, but the hot fury rushing through Michael makes him barely aware of the chill. It should be warmer, but there’s a breeze, and it whispers in the trees, telling secrets Michael doesn’t want to know. He’s had enough of secrets and shadows and whispering, whispering, whispering…

Whispering, carried by the wind.

“Michael.” A whisper, a sigh. Caressing his name. Lips and throat and tongue handling his name tenderly, like a holy thing. 

There’s only one person who says his name like that. Who is raspy and soft, and who flies. He doesn’t hear any footsteps. He hates David, he hates him. 

Why does David come there? The only thing could be Michael, but it _can’t_ be Michael; David doesn’t care about Michael. He should just _go_.

 _Sam_ , he thinks, _Sam_. David’s yellow eyes flash in his mind, his fangs out, blood down his throat, and he thinks of bright Sam. How did he get caught up in _David?_

Terrible in his grief, that’s what Star said. And Michael had felt sorry for him, misguidedly so. David could take care of his own fucking self.

“Michael.”

The way he says Michael’s name.

“Michael.”

God.

Michael listens, but he doesn’t stop walking. Something– the wind and leaves– rustle behind him. He doesn’t want to look at David. 

“Michael,” says David behind him. Soft, but no longer mocking. A request, and nothing more. “You’re the only one I have left.”

He’s lonely. That’s what it boils down to. 

_He should just make himself another half-vampire to wait on him_ , Michael thinks bitterly. He’s glad Grandpa saw Sam home this afternoon.

Michael turns. Through gritted teeth, “What do you want from me?”

David stops short, still in the air, surprise flashing across his face, as if he didn’t expect Michael to respond, or as if he can’t believe Michael would be so short with him. Michael can never tell with David.

“I…” David’s throat bobs. His hands are pale; he still doesn’t have gloves. He watches Michael, watches Michael, watches Michael.

So Michael was right; he’s lonely. That’s it. He wants someone to talk to, and Michael will do. 

Michael tries to squash the disappointment that sinks through him and tries not to look at David’s pale eyelashes as David looks down. 

“If you’re in such desperate need of company,” he says bitingly, “You can go to Star’s.”

David flies closer.

Somehow, he’s not afraid. David won’t kill him. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows it. David would’ve killed him earlier if he wanted him dead. No, David wants him alive, for one twisted reason or another. And he won’t hurt Star. David cares about Star the way Michael cares for her himself. The unfair kind of love that’s more holding on than holding, but care none-the-less. 

Star wanted to talk to David, and Michael doesn’t want to talk to David anymore, so it all works out perfectly. Absolutely. Perfectly. 

David has followed him to the white wooden gate, where anyone at home could look through the window and see them. Michael’s heart kicks.

David twitches at the name, almost a wince. “I don’t know where she is.” He says it simply, as someone might say _checkmate_.

“Seaside Cove, top apartment.”

David loses his pleading undertone as quickly as he gained it; now he sounds bored and flat. “Hi Star, I’m still alive. Yes, me, David. Your boyfriend sent me here. Am I invited?”

 _I’m not her boyfriend._ Michael doesn’t say it; it sounds petty and immature in his mind. He tightens his hand around the wood of the gate. It’s rough and old, the paint chipping so that when he clenches his fist, a splinter bites into his palm. “She already knows.”

David stills. “You _told_ her?” It’s that note again, the terrible, dark one that almost sounds like hurt.

Michael feels compelled to defend himself in spite of it all. “I didn’t,” he swears, “She figured it out.”

David blinks, but he still doesn’t go. In the bright, yellow-lit window of the house, shadows flit about.

And yet, his heart still pounds as David stands there, watching him, watching him, watching. 

He wants to get away and he doesn’t, he wants to care for David and he never wants David anywhere near him again, David leans against the gate, looking small and fragile in Michael’s coat, obviously on purpose, and Michael wants to punch him. There’s still blood running from David’s nose. Michael wants to make him bleed more. 

Fucking _Sam_. 

“Star isn’t one of mine.” David’s voice could cut the night, sever the world, it’s so sharp and cold. “She’s yours.”

Michael turns, then. David is standing, his shoulders pulled tight. He looks small, but maybe he’s doing it on purpose. “Star doesn’t belong to anybody, but it was your blood, wasn’t it? And I’m not yours either.”

Something happens, then, to David. It’s as if he deflates.

“You have–” David points. His eyes kept flicking to Michael’s neck tonight, and Michael thought maybe he was thinking of biting Michael, but he says, “A hickey.” He laughs flatly. “Human bite.” He sounds bitter.

 _Star_. He’d forgotten about his tumble with Star in the rush of his time with David. Michael presses his neck– sure enough, it stings, and David must see it on his face because something else flashes through those gray-blue eyes. God, he’s had enough of David’s judgement. 

“Go to Star’s, or go to hell,” he says. “Just don’t come back.”

David finally looks away from Michael, and Michael’s thudding heart slows. “I don’t want to sleep with her.”

There. David has run out of things to say, and Michael has won, and David will go, and Michael will stop having a war in his chest.

“You don’t even sleep at night.” He can’t look at David while he says the next part. “And you certainly don’t want to sleep with me, so why are you here, then?”

David stares at him. 

His gray-blue eyes, flat. His mouth, the smirk gone. 

He is, Michael realizes suddenly, trembling.

“Do you want me to go?” he whispers.

 _No_ , Michael thinks. _No_ , says Michael’s heart. 

David swallows, his throat moving. Michael remembers the first night he saw David by the tree. The trickle of blood down David’s neck, and his cold laugh.

And he thinks of Sam, terrified, fighting Dwayne. Determined to save Michael. And David, turning Michael into someone who needed saving.

“Killing anyone tonight?”

David closes his eyes. He does not answer. It’s answer enough.

“Go,” says Michael.

David’s mouth pulls down, but when he opens his eyes, his gaze is flat and unaffected. “Alright,” he says at last.

David goes.

It occurs to Michael that David has watched him walk away from the tree by his grave every night, but Michael has never watched David go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I is attempt angst.


	4. you would still miss me in your bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David can't stand Star, lover of Michael. He can't stand Star, the incessant. He's leaving.

**DAVID**

Michael must have slept with Star in that bed.

He can’t help but think it when he first steps in. 

Michael must have slept with Star in that soft, warm-looking queen-sized bed in this well-kept, organized apartment and what does David have? Nothing.

Nothing but a dark, dark, messy, messy, sunken hotel that he can’t bear to go back to, which couldn’t matter less when Michael doesn’t want to come back to his _anything_ anyway.

There was a bed in the hotel, too. Star’s bed, sometimes Laddie’s if Laddie was there– they were the only ones who slept horizontally. The only ones still human.

Michael must have slept in that bed with Star, David thinks, and his gut turns black as an oil spill. Watch the fire, watch. It will burn him to the ground. 

“You’re not invited to the rest of the apartment,” Star says, and closes the door. She stays a good distance from him, and David doesn’t care either way; he doesn’t feel anything like the ways he feels around Michael. Michael.

 _Just don’t come back_. Michael. He’d flown away from Michael, and now he doesn’t have to be afraid of anything; Michael can’t hurt him.

And David is hurting anyway.

Michael’s voice says Go to Star’s or go to hell, and Michael’s neck had a hickey on it, and Star had a bed that sometimes had Michael in it. What is the difference? Star’s or hell. Hell and stars both burn.

Oil in David’s gut, watch the fire.

“Do you have food?” David isn't hungry, but his gut is twisting. David isn’t hungry, but his mind is endlessly churning on itself. David isn’t hungry, but his chest, oh, his heart, oh. “I’m hungry.”

Star is silent for a long moment. The room David stands in is a kitchen-living room-office mesh, and the refrigerator is right there, white and boxy, domestic and human. David has never wanted to be human quite the way he wants to now. 

“Go ahead.” Star allows him to eat, and eat, and eat, until he’s only eating to grate on her. 

Star’s soft voice comes over the table. David hates her soft voice. She sounds like a woman, and he can see Michael falling like quicksand, and David is on solid ground watching, but he is afraid. He cannot take a step or he will sink too, following Michael, following Michael, falling. 

“Have you fed?”

Bitter acid, the thrumming chord of mild anger. David holds up his wooden chopsticks. Rice. _Tell me, Michael._ “Feeding right now.”

Star shakes her head. The clock shows nearly midnight, which explains the shadows under her eyes. David gets a guilty, vindictive pleasure in knowing her life isn’t all sunshine and Michael; she has nights like the rest of them. Dark and unhappy, she is imperfect like the rest of them, and then the pleasure is gone. Dark and unhappy has seeped into David, too. “You know what I mean.”

David’s chest gives a pang. “Why does it matter?”

Star is quiet again. 

David hates Star’s silence. As if David is not worth Star’s time or attention. Star has Michael and David does not, and that should be enough to settle them even a dozen times.

Shouldn’t it?

Star has Michael. Does she even realize?

Does anyone want David around?

Perhaps not. Perhaps it is obligation and pity that create and maintain the only relationships to the living he still has. 

“Michael seems to think you ‘love killing.’” 

He hates the look in her eyes. He is a predator, an animal that she is trying to read and manipulate, humanity stripped away. Trying not to provoke him. To twist one of his limbs the wrong way or raise his hackles. 

“I’m sorry about your Lost Boys.”

She doesn’t say it like she means it, the way Michael did. Michael, Michael, he cared too much. About getting things right. About Sam. _Christ_ , Sam. She says it as if it is a stepping stone, a bleeding cut of meat that will allow her to step closer until she can fit the collar. She cannot realize that of the two of them, he is not the only one being studied. 

“But your grief–” There it is. “–has nothing to do with the people of Santa Carla. You shouldn’t kill more than you need to feed on.”

“Are you telling me how to feed?” David lets his throat catch on the words roughly, so they come out as a growl. He will sound the predator if he chooses. He chooses. 

He will _be_ the predator if he chooses… but Michael does not want him to be. He will hit the breaking point, but he is not there yet, and he does not want to be the one to give in, to stand down and sidestep the catastrophe. But he is not going to lose control. No, he is going to kill someone and drink them– just not right now. He cannot bring himself to when he thinks too hard about Michael, and he is always thinking too hard about Michael.

But he will alleviate the hunger.

Only right now, it is not so unbearable. That is all.

“Should I take it to the ones my real quarrel is with, then? I know where the Frog family lives.”

David has tried to swallow his wild hatred for them, but only with a small amount of success; it still simmers in him, always.

At least Michael told him what he wanted David to do instead of putting a lead around his throat. David imagines Michael putting a lead around his throat and swallows and stops imagining it and is glad he has not had any blood tonight. It would give him enough blood to flush.

Better than that, Michael’s world is painted in right and wrongs, grayed shades of morality. His pencil-sketch of David may be lighter than David deserves, but at least he believes David has light.

Star has paled. “Leave those boys alone. They’re just children.” She adds pointedly, “Michael cares for them.”

David tries not to be, but he is bitter, and it eats away like acid at his flesh and bones, sweeping through his veins of borrowed blood. He is suddenly sure that Star does not realize. _She has Michael_. How lucky she is, how fortunate. How much David would give.

“I don’t.” David shoves the food away. He is far too full for someone who did not even start hungry, and the Chinese cartons remind him too much of Michael. “Not Marko and Dwayne and Paul. I owe them vengeance at least.”

He is terrible for the gladness he feels in her horror, but everybody knows he is terrible anyway. It is alright.

“You haven’t even tried to kill them.”

“Yet.” He won’t later, either. He wouldn’t be able to without thinking of… but he doesn’t not ever go where they live, because if he ever saw them, he would kill them on the spot. But Star doesn’t need to know that, and she might be able to tell he cares for Michael but she doesn’t need to know how much.

“David that’s–” Star stops. She doesn’t seem to understand. 

“I haven’t been killing more than I need.” 

Star makes a surprised noise.

David draws idle and invisible drawings on the table with the wooden chopstick. “If that helps you leave it alone.”

It doesn’t. Star never listens. To anyone, to anyone. David wonders if she listens to Michael. He wonders if Michael listens to her. 

She looks as if she doesn’t believe him. David wouldn’t believe himself, either, if they had switched places. He remembers her witnessing him and his boys on one of their killing sprees. Fire and blood spraying, though perhaps not as showy as the performance they’d put on for Michael.

David doesn’t think telling her that killing isn’t fun without the boys will earn him very much sympathy, but it’s true. David doesn’t think telling her Michael makes him ache when he asks if he’s killed every night will go well for him, considering what the two of them have.

“So why does Michael–”

“Michael,” David cuts her off sharply. His name on someone else’s lips slices like a blade. “Has already made up his mind about me.”

Star notices. 

Of course she notices. “I don’t think he has,” she says gently. Still an experiment, poking at him, watching his reactions. Still, he can’t help but react.

He snaps the chopsticks without thinking.

They are thin and weak. They are dry and pale, wooden.

Black oil in David’s gut, David will burn. Churning heat, fluttering stomach. Eighteen again, but David isn’t going back to that tree, because Michael told him not to and David will not burn.

Because he will not see Michael again and there is nothing to be afraid of.

“Going to sleep,” he mutters to Star.

The clock chimes midnight but he doesn’t care for staying awake.

He should have stayed awake. He should have made sure his and Star’s sleep schedules were the exact flips of each other’s.

He is grateful she has let him into her bedroom, where the dark curtains allow him to be about the room during the day. But he cannot stand sharing waking hours with her.

She is incessant.

“What exactly is happening with you and Michael?”

 _Nothing, nothing. Nothing, and I wish, I wish…_ “Nothing you’re interested in.”

“ _I care about Michael_.” Fiercely. Earnestly, angrily. Easily. “I’m worried about him.”

David cannot even imagine the words _I care about Michael_ on his tongue. They will burn him. He laughs. “You’re worried about him.” Star hates it when he repeats things with no commentary but a mocking tone. So does Michael. Oh, what the two of them have in common. 

David shouldn’t even have come if he was going to be like this. 

_Just don’t come back_.

“Yes. Are you hurting him?” Star stands right in front of him and makes David look at her. He doesn’t understand it; he can lie right to her face without a blink. He can with most. 

But he says, “No.” And he says, “I wouldn’t.”

Star scoffs. David wants to rip her throat out. It is only a simmering hurt and it is not her fault. But it is a brand of hurt nonetheless, and he wants to. “You wouldn’t,” she repeats, in his way.

“Why is that so hard to believe?” But he knows why it’s so hard to believe. Who he is. What he is. What he’s done, and to Michael in particular. So he says, “You’re the one biting him.”

He shouldn’t have said it. 

Star is far too clever.

And she is incessant.

“I am going,” David says in the afternoon, “to sleep.”

“You did in the morning.”

“You’ve driven me to exhaustion.”

Star is silent. David still cannot bring himself to sleep in her bed, but she has promised Laddie will join her and David can take Laddie’s bed. If she had not, he would’ve hung in the closet. He wonders if Star’s bed smells faintly of Michael, the way Michael’s jacket does. 

“What if Michael comes here?”

David can’t help the flinch this time; it is automatic. The idea of Star and Michael together, here, has swelled like an ocean, salty and drowning him, draining him slowly. He thinks of it every moment he is here. And it has thrown him against the rocks. 

“Michael told me to come here. You can’t throw me out, or you’ll upset him.” 

This isn’t true. Michael didn’t care where David went.

Star is in the doorway of Laddie’s room. She is the single most pitying thing David has ever seen, and more than anything, it is this that makes him determined not to crumble. “I’m not taking sides. I want you to know that if he comes, I won’t turn him away. If you’re avoiding him…” Her implication is _get out._ He hears it loud and clear, the toll of a bell.

“He’s not coming.” The bedspread is white, the corners are untucked. David tucks them. “He’s not particularly interested in seeing me.”

Star whispers something under her breath, but David doesn’t hear it. And he doesn’t care enough to ask. 

He sleeps through to past midnight. 

And in the morning, Star is incessant.

“Did you hurt him?”

“I wouldn’t hurt him.” David stabs the egg she fried up. Hunger yawns in his stomach. It is not hunger for food, but he eats the food. He eats, and he eats more. Star watches him and doesn’t comment, but he knows she is thinking. “But I’ve told you that already.”

Star. “So what happened to him?” 

Star is convinced he would have come. Star is used to Michael always coming. Always, always. She is not David, who rushes to the tree every night just to catch ten minutes. She is not David who carefully cradles every moment because Michael might not talk to him again.

Won’t. 

Won’t talk to him again.

No, she is not David at all.

“Please.” David leans forward and ignores the growl of his stomach, the painful clench. Her pulse beats and beats, and black oil in his gut will burn him, so he does not know why he is playing with fire. But he asks anyway: “Explain to me, what is it that makes you think he’ll come back to you? Is what you have just that _special?_ ”

Her eyes flash knowingly. He gave the game up last night, when he mentioned the hickey. He does not know why he is still playing. Perhaps talking about Michael is becoming a placeholder for talking with Michael.

Maybe Star is tired of him, or maybe she pities him too much to talk about it, but she doesn’t respond.

They exist quietly into the midafternoon before she goes to work. Neither of them mentions it, but she’ll talk to Michael. It isn’t hard to read her.

He wonders what she will say to Michael, and what Michael will say back. His stomach twists. He wonders if they will kiss, and he tries to sleep, but his stomach is still twisting.

He eats more of Star’s food. He’s growing to hate Chinese.

He eats it anyway.

And his stomach still twists.

Star is warm, David can sense it when she comes back in. It could be the Santa Carla summer sun. It could be something she did with Michael. It could be the hungry cry in David’s veins.

It could be. It could.

He thinks he has gotten off fine until she brings out dinner. It is not Chinese. That is good. 

She says to him, “Why do you try to make Michael believe that you’re a monster?”

And time skids to a stop, screeching like Dwayne turning his bike. That first time, with Michael offering Star a date. If that hadn’t happened, David wouldn’t feel like this right now. This is the cliff he nearly sent Michael off of. 

“I don’t want Michael to think I’m a monster,” he murmurs. It’s strangely difficult to push the words out. Because they are true. It is so hard to say true things that matter.

Star waits. And then. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know what you’re looking for.” David pushes the pizza slices around, and takes just cheese. The cheese has rich marinara underneath. It’s red. “But that’s my answer.”

“I don’t remember you ever taking ‘perverse enjoyment’ out of feeding.” Star bites her lip, and then amends, “Not afterward, anyway. Only in the moment.” 

His stomach contracts. _Feeding_. He eats his cheese pizza. It’s hot, and the tomato sauce is red. It’s nearly the same thing. He chews and he swallows. It is not the same thing at all.

She is quiet.

She already knows how he feels. 

And she has Michael.

But David feels a bit weak and tired. He doesn’t feel like arguing, or pushing it, or beginning a quiet contest, who can wait out the other the longest.

He stares at the tomato sauce on his fingers. He didn’t sleep very well, and his eyes are fluttering, and so in the blurry half-vision he gets of his fingertips, it looks like blood.

But it isn’t.

“Maybe,” he says quietly, “I just like having less to lose.” 

He’s never thought it.

He’s certainly never said it.

He just did it. Just let Michael believe it. Michael would wind up thinking David the monster in the comic book anyway; at least David would have the say over when. At least it would be for good reason.

And Star doesn’t say anything. 

Star and her endless, unbearable silences, pressing him only until he says something that will press him without her help.

It’s well done, he has to admit. He feels empty and purposeless without Michael. Without his Lost Boys. Without even Star to take his mind off of his solitude.

He is alone in Laddie’s room, tired. His stomach will not stop turning, and his head feels a little dizzy, and perhaps it is only his lack of energy that causes him to give in, but by the middle of the night he is standing in Star’s bedroom doorway. He cannot sleep around his stomach, but he does not want to go out.

He will not. It is not so incredibly bad just yet.

“Star,” he says. 

She is a light sleeper and she wakes noiselessly, slipping out of bed as quietly as a cat. She closes the door behind. 

“What–” He swallows. “What does Michael think of me?”

He has caved first.

And Star smiles.

She tells him things. She tells him that she does not think Michael has decided David is a monster yet, even though David hasn’t made it easy to believe in him. 

_Michael_ , he thinks. Foolish Michael who trusted David, who believed David was good– _and still does_ , at least a little _._ Still does. 

Warmth, the kind of warmth he hasn’t felt since nights by the tree, rushes through him. _Michael_ , he thinks, and pulls Michael’s jacket tighter around him. 

She tells him that Michael has been worried about him. 

_Me?_ David asks, only he doesn’t ask it. _Yes, me_. 

She says that he is always asking: whether vampires get cold, where the nearest Chinese place is, whether David would mind if Michael went down to the hotel and retrieved things for him.

Cold, yes, but vampires never mind it. Never until they’ve learned to crave warmth, the way David has on Michael’s fingertips, in the curl of Michael’s hand around his own the very first night David emerged from his grave feeling remade. It’s a surprise, an oversight, but not an unwelcome one, to think Michael asked where to find Chinese. 

That Michael _asked._

Michael.

Somehow it has never occurred to David that Michael’s visits were thought about, premeditated. David thinks about Michael thinking about David and feels as if he might burn and burn, the thrumming in his chest threatening to sweep him up and end him.

Oh, Chinese. 

David would mind if Michael went to the hotel. He is glad Michael did not. He is even more glad that Michael cares whether David would mind and even more glad than that that Michael is thinking about David missing his things, and David. Can’t. 

David is so glad.

“He cares about you,” Star says, as if it isn’t clear. 

_He cares about you._

_Michael cares about you._

Hell.

“I want to talk to him,” David says. David says it out loud. “I’ll go talk to him.

Star yawns wide; it’s a few hours past midnight, but David can’t bring himself to be sorry for waking her.

Yawns are contagious. David yawns.

Star’s eyes flutter and then narrow, and she scrubs her hands across her eyes. “When was the last time you slept?”

“A couple of hours ago,” he assures her, but his throat is gritty. It isn’t a lie; he slept but barely. For a few minutes at the most. His stomach hurts. “I’m going to go.”

Star’s apartment has a window that’s easy to shove open, only David feels weak just now. 

“David?” Star’s sleepy eyes are sharp now, her voice quicker and nervous. She is so quick to change. She should stay the same; it is easier. “When was the last time you fed?”

He has eaten plenty. When was the last time he fed?

He doesn’t want to feed. He doesn’t want to. 

David shrugs. The morning wind is cold, blowing through the apartment and making Star shiver. “When?”

He feels weak, but he is not so bad.

“David?” Her voice shivers around in the wind as he climbs onto the window sill. “Why aren’t you feeding?”

But David is already flying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst train! Nyooom.


	5. drunk on this pain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David seems so tired. He seems so pale. He seems so weak. He seems so... flirty. Oh no. Oh no.

**MICHAEL**

David.

The name is the first thing that rings through Michael’s sleep-thick mind. Then it is _Sam_ , and _Is Sam safe._

 _Michael_ , the winds whisper, rattling his window and whirling, whirling, whirling. When he stumbles out of bed, the cold air wakes him up and sweeps his muddy thoughts up until his mind is clear.

David isn’t coming around with his boys, whispering Michael’s name, the sound of their engines on the wind. Sam is not standing beside him, watching lights flash through the blinds.

So the next thing he thinks is _again?_

He doesn’t even know how they did it the first time– were they even there? Did they create an illusion the way they messed with the food, or did they use their flight? His bets are on an illusion.

At this hour– so close before sunrise– it has to be a trick.

 _Michael,_ the winds whisper, _Michael_. 

It’s David’s voice. It’s always David’s voice.

The way he says Michael’s name. _Mi-chael._ Stretching the _i_ mockingly– it may be wishful thinking, but sometimes Michael almost feels it’s fond. 

He hopes the illusion will lift with the rising sun, and he waits. 

But it doesn’t.

 _Michael, Michael,_ Michael, Michael–

Michael opens the curtain.

David is hovering at his window.

 _David._ Is actually, physically hovering at his window, and he is grinning. It’s not the grin Michael was after, but it makes his heart flutter nonetheless. David has bags under his eyes, and he isn’t looking too good, although Michael can’t put a finger on why, but David’s grin looks soft and not even the slightest bit mocking or malicious. 

His pale fingers press against the glass, and his mouth moves. _Michael_. Somehow, the name flits and flutters about the room, even though they’re separated by a thick sheet of glass. His spiky hair in the moonlight, the longer part in the back dipping below the collar of Michael’s jacket. Michael wants him, wants him, wants him.

And he is still angry.

He will not forget that.

But he opens the window.

“David.” The air swirls through the room and carries with it the scent of David: blood and dirt and faint smoke, and the clean new furniture smell of Star’s apartment. The air tonight seems to have a spirit of its own. “What do you want?”

David’s feet set so gently on the window sill, they don’t make a sound. “Invite me in.”

Michael stares. David leans against the side of the window as if leaning against a doorway, his expression soft instead of the stone-set mask Michael is usually faced with. He looks tired. He looks so tired.

But Michael is angry. He’ll remember it: he’s angry. “What you said about Sam–”

David’s expression drops like a stone, and cold washes over Michael that has nothing to do with the wind. “I only said it to upset you.” He frowns, as if it pains him to say it.

“Well congratulations, you upset me.” 

Why isn’t this commotion waking others up? Likely because David has done something so that they’re the only ones who can hear this conversation. The idea rankles Michael. David should just leave it alone. All of it. Michael and Sam, and their lives free of disruption and confusion and secrets.

“Come on,” David sighs at him, leaning even more against the window sill and smiling. “‘M tired, let me in.”

“No.” But he says it too slow, and David pounces on his hesitancy.

“You invited me before,” he croons. “Oh yes. Stay at our place, you said, stay with me.”

 _What’s going on?_ Michael almost asks, and David answers in his head, _What’s going on, Marko?_ Who wants to know? _Michael wants to know._ He reaches out and touches David’s chin without thinking, tipping it up. His skin is soft, and his long stubble is softer. He thinks of kissing down David’s jawline, and he has to swallow a swell in his chest. David lifts his head, almost obediently.

“Are you drunk?”

David grins and shakes his head. “Nope.” Maybe he’s been smoking something green. David tilts his head, still grinning, young and earnest. “Let me in, Michael?”

Michael studies David more carefully this time, trying not to get distracted by David’s skin in the moonlight and his achingly open smile. David, he realizes, is clinging to the windowpane, looking unbalanced. He looks tired, maybe even sick. If David was pale before, he’s a little paler still, pasty almost. 

“Sun’s coming up,” David sing-songs softly. “Tired. I’m tired, Michael.”

Michael swallows, and David wobbles a little bit. The sun will be coming up, horrifyingly soon, and David doesn’t look like he’s going to move. “You’re invited,” he finally relents, his voice rough. “Get in. So much as step out of this room–”

David cocks his head and smiles a puzzled smile. It’s achingly, stupidly cute, and it makes Michael’s stomach flip-flop. “I don’t want to be anywhere else,” he murmurs. 

Michael closes the window shutters. Is he taking advantage, listening to David now? Something is up with David, his guard down, gone, like a puff of smoke, and he feels as if he’s betraying David’s trust by letting him say these things, and listening.

“Well you can stay here at least until sundown,” Michael promises. 

David is standing in Michael’s room, and Michael’s whole being aches. The way he looks around Michael’s room, standing right in the middle of the room. Tired and slumped. Curious, still. 

He wants David. He cares for David.

So much.

So much. 

God, he’s beautiful.

David smiles at him, tugging at the collar of Michael’s jacket. Is it officially David’s now? Perhaps. He’s still watching Michael, watching Michael, watching Michael. 

“Are you going to ask me if I killed anyone?” he asks. It is tinged with bitterness, and that dark feeling that– yes, it must be– is hurt. His voice is light, but it is so full of feeling, Michael goes weak in the knees.

It is a bucket of cold water. 

David is tired, he looks pasty, he is off balance and weak and he’s acting so strange…

“God,” Michael mutters, catching David as David sways on his feet. “Is that why you’re like this?”

He’s surprisingly light, thin and… maybe malnourished. He doesn’t mind Michael pulling him up into his arms in a bridal carry, and that’s a sign something is wrong if there ever was one. 

He feels so right in Michael’s arms. Michael’s heart skips painfully, skips, skips. The shape of him, the weight of him, the look David is giving him now– he tries not to notice it– even the hard edge of David’s lighter in the back pocket of David’s jeans digging into Michael’s hip. He knows he’ll remember the feel of David in his arms like this for a long time.

David looks put out, his blue eyes fluttering shut and opening again to look up at Michael, his head resting on Michael’s chest. “You didn’t ask me.”

He remembers wanting to hold David and care for him. Fuck, be careful what you fucking wish for. This. _Hurts._ What will David be like when he’s back to himself? How will Michael survive it?

Fuck. 

“Let’s get you to bed,” he murmurs. “You’re tired, right? You can sleep in my bed.”

David looks pleased and amused. “Your bed,” he repeats brightly. Michael aches. “Sleep with me, Michael.” He clutches at Michael’s shirt as Michael starts to move off of him, holding him there. His eyes are so vivid, gray-blue like the stormy skies in acrylic paintings.

He _still_ says Michael’s name like _that._

And the look in his eyes makes it obvious what kind of sleeping he’s talking about.

Heat floods through Michael’s veins like wildfire. It leaves him breathless, leaves him burned and in ashes, nothing left unscorched. “David.” His voice hiccups. 

God, David. David’s hand moves over him. When he reaches for David’s hand, Michael realizes he’s shaking. The sheer want that this brings out in him, the sharpness of the ache leaves him lost. 

Gently, he pulls David’s hand away and kisses it. “Maybe when you feel better,” he says, knowing when David feels better he’ll want nothing like this.

He tries not to think about it right now; he needs David to get better and be happy for real. God, he wants David to be happy and okay. That’s all he wants.

Is this love?

Is this what it’s like to love somebody?

David, fuck. 

“Why are you sad, Michael?” 

Michael pulls off David’s boots and tosses the blanket over David. 

But it hurts. Fuck, he wants this. Fuck, his chest aches, and David’s face is so open and caring.

Michael kisses David.

On the forehead.

“I wish you really wanted this.” He hopes David won’t remember.

David’s expression changes, softening from drowsy contentment to a tenderness that might rip Michael apart. 

“I’m so afraid of you,” David whispers.

Lucy says she can’t imagine her sweet Michael frightening anyone, but that’s not worth much; she’s his mother.

Sam only wrinkles his nose. “You _wish_ ,” he snickers. “You’re not even a vampire anymore. Now _that_ was scary. Why’d you ask?”

Michael downs the rest of his water and refills the cup. He’s so thirsty– how thirsty is David? How long has he gone without blood? “Star’s afraid of me,” he lies.

Sam looks at him as if he’s being stupid. “So ask Star.”

He asked David, but David was already asleep. He can’t imagine David– graceful, deadly David with knife-sharp wit and life-learned wisdom– being afraid of _Michael._ Michael, awkward Michael who feels like a newborn colt on wobbling legs when he’s around David.

Sam’s eyes widen, and he grins. “Is Star the one you’re in love with?”

 _In– In–?_ “I’m not in love with anyone.” _Is he?_

Sam gives him a superior look. “Yes you are. I can tell.” He grins. “I’m your brother.”

Michael flips him off and steals some of the Nutella. “You don’t know anything, Sam. You’ve never been in love.”

“No,” Sam agrees proudly. “I don’t need to! You come home late at night looking just like all the guys on TV, and you’re always keeping it a secret from Mom. And where’s your jacket? Didja give it to your girlfriend? I bet you did.”

“Oh for God’s sake, television isn’t real,” Michael mutters. But he did give his jacket to David. And he did look forward to seeing him every night. And he certainly had some dreams. “And I met him a month ago.”

Sam drops the Nutella and his jaw drops. “ _Him?_ Mike, you have a _boyfriend?_ ”

Michael stares. He opens his mouth. He closes it. _Shit_. “No.”

“But you’re _in love with a guy?_ Mikey are you _gay_?” Sam is smiling so widely, Michael is beginning to question the Rob Lowe poster on Sam’s closet door. It’s on his _closet door._

Is he… gay? No. He wanted Star once. And he wants David now. He wants David so badly, _so badly_. He can’t not be gay. He must like men. “I don’t know.” He says to Sam. “I think men are…” he feels heat rise to his cheeks. _David_. “You know…” He looks at Sam.

Sam looks back, wide eyed and utterly non judgemental. He loves his brother so much sometimes. “Okay!” he agrees, with contagious enthusiasm. “That’s great Mike!”

“Thanks Sam.” God, he really loves his brother. 

“Can I meet him?” 

_Meet him._ Michael wishes. He really does. If not Lucy– which would be far too embarrassing– he’d like to have both Sam and David in the same room. But that would never work out. “No, Sam.”

“Awww Mikey,” Sam pouts. No. Michael takes it back. Brothers are annoying. “If I got a boyfriend, I’d introduce you, I promise.” 

So he is. Huh.

“Good.” Michael ruffles Sam’s hair, and Sam swats him away. “Then I can beat his ass.”

Sam just grins widely. “You too, Mike. But only if he breaks your heart. Otherwise, he’s good with me.”

 _No he isn’t_ , Michael thinks. _No, he really isn’t._

Could David break his heart? Michael isn’t so sure. David hasn’t given him anything that he could take away: no promises, no touches, no kisses, nothing to lose, to miss. Except for David himself. Who he may be in love with.

David could break his heart, he thinks. Yeah, he probably could.

He shakes it off. He has more important things to think about than whether he’s fucking _in love_ with someone. 

Is he? 

Is he in love with David? 

“Sam, in your comic books, how long can a vampire survive without blood?”

Sam shrugs. “It depends on how much blood they drank the last time they drank blood. You wanna read one? I can get you one of those comics; they’re up in my room.” 

David’s asleep up there, and he looks young, seventeen, when he’s asleep. _Why_ has he gone without blood? “Well how _much_ blood do they need?” He doesn’t ask for a comic book. They’re so… monstrously rendered in those comic books. 

Sam considers this. “I think about a kill every other day is enough. Three days is pushing it.”

Michael blinks. David always seemed to kill every three days or so, but he thought it was only because David liked being excessive. That’s what David acted like. _Pushing it?_

Maybe the comic book is wrong. 

Or maybe Michael just hasn’t been paying attention.

There’s a clatter upstairs.

Sam looks up. “What was that? Is mom home?” He’s got his finger in a jar of Nutella, and he pulls it out hastily, screwing on the top. “I thought she was out!”

“Probably Nanook,” Michael mumbles, relieved when Sam hums and returns to his Nutella. 

Michael hurries up the stairs.

“Mom got you a new jacket, it’s by the door,” Sam calls after him. “So if your man doesn’t give yours back, it’s there.”

“Okay,” Michael calls down. 

“So you _did_ give it to your boyfriend!”

“Shut up Sam!”

David is sitting up in Michael’s bed, wrapped in the blanket. It’s fucking adorable. Michael is going to break. He looks less tired, but his skin is still pasty-pale, even more so than this morning. 

He nearly brought David lunch– although he’s sure David would scoff at a Nutella sandwich– but then he realized David sleeps all day and doesn’t eat at noon. He remembered how tired David looked and decided to let him sleep– and now, mid-afternoon– David has finally woken up.

Eight hours ago slams into Michael like a bowling ball. _Sleep with me. I don’t want to be anywhere else._ David’s hair has softened out of it’s spikes, mussed and falling over his forehead. Michael wants to run his fingers through David’s hair– is it as soft as David’s beard? 

When he gets closer, David looks much less _sweet_ ; his hairline is beaded with sweat and he is shivering in the blankets, which are pulled taut around him, his hands fisted in them. He’s biting his lip hard. 

Michael’s heart twists tight enough to break in his chest.

“David?” Michael whispers, and David’s eyes flick up at him. 

His eyes are yellow.

“When was the last time you drank someone’s blood?”

David’s eyelashes flutter and he shuts his yellow eyes, his pale brows pulling together. He looks like he’s trying to count and can’t figure it out. “Hmm,” he answers weakly.

Could it have been _Michael_ that made him stop? No, David never cared what Michael thought. 

Right?

 _Are you going to ask me if I killed anyone? You didn’t ask me._

Could it have been?

“It doesn’t matter,” Michael shushes David, pushing his hair back. “This is blood deprivation isn’t it? That’s what’s wrong with you.” 

David’s shoulders shrug beneath the blanket, and he grins, though his eyes stay closed. “There’s a lot of things wrong with me.” 

His fangs aren’t out yet, and his face hasn’t transformed, but Michael has the sinking sense that it won’t be long– far sooner, in fact, than sundown will come. 

“No there aren’t.” Michael doesn’t think David’s listening. The windows don’t let sunlight in at midday– the sun’s just about directly above them– but it’s still pretty warm, and David’s still shivering.

Michael moves to sit beside David, to help him wrap the blankets tighter at least, but David’s eyes fly open. 

“You smell like blood.” His voice is raspier, thicker than usual. “You should go.”

“And leave you with Sam?” Michael can’t help but say.

David’s yellow eyes flash. “I didn’t mean it when I said that, Michael. I wouldn’t have done it.”

In spite of the situation, Michael’s irrationally glad he’s pulled David’s attention to focus again, even for a moment. “You meant to hurt me when you said it, that’s why I’m pissed. Christ, David, I know you wouldn’t have. You’re not a monster.”

David swallows fast, twice, and his eyes fall shut again. “Cool,” he says faintly. 

“David,” Michael murmurs, because David looks like he’s losing consciousness or control, he can’t tell, and saying David’s name always gets a reaction out of him. 

“David.” Sure enough, David’s body twitches. He’s listening. “You need blood.”

“Bingo!” David sings under his breath. “Good job, Emerson. Michael Emerson. Michael.”

Michael doesn’t think _he_ can stand much more of this, let alone David surviving it. “Alright, well you’ll have to drink from me.”

David straightens and his eyes fly open– they’re _blue_. Blue-grey, and pale in the bedroom light. Blue, blue, blue, human, human, human. Lovely. Impossibly lovely. 

“No.” David’s struggling to unwrap himself from the blanket, but he’s weak and clumsy right now. “No, I won’t.”

Michael helps him free his arms, but doesn’t let him get up, his heart racing and his head spinning. Does David care about him that much? Or is there another reason? Perhaps he just can’t swallow the idea of putting his mouth on Michael. 

“Do you think you can make it until sundown, then?”

David smiles. “Nope!” He pops the _P_ cheerfully. “Not without transforming against my will!”

“So, what, you’ll drink from Sam instead? Or Lucy, or Grandpa?” 

David shakes his head. When he blinks, his eyes are yellow again. “No, Michael. I’ll lose my control if I don’t have blood soon, not my life. Just tie me up here, and then you can set me loose at sundown. I’ll survive that.” And then he has the nerve– or absence of mind– to _wink_ at Michael. 

The blankets are warm. The bed is warm. The room is warm– everything is suddenly very warm. _It’s summer time, after all,_ Michael thinks quickly. He shakes his head at David. “Won’t that hurt you?”

David only grins– is fangs have come out– and leans towards Michael. “What, are you concerned, Mister Emerson? Do you worry about me?” His smile drops as fast as it came, and his eyes fall to Michael’s neck, as if David’s dragging them away, and they keep returning. “Tell me, Michael, do you worry about me?”

In his chest, his heart stutters and stumbles and falls, and Michael thinks he’s just on the edge of falling apart, he has no idea what to _do_ , but he doesn’t do anything but take David’s hands. There’s red on them, but he’s barely looking. They’re so cold. They’re like ice, like the hands of someone who has spent all day in the snow with no gloves on. 

“I do.” He feels awkward and wrong, as if he’s speaking to a child– or to no one at all. David isn’t really all here, or he wouldn’t be flirting with Michael, and yet for some reason, he feels compelled to answer truthfully. Perhaps _because_ David isn’t all here. “And I’m not doing it if it will hurt you.”

Pulling his hands away, David frowns and his eyes drop from Michael entirely. “That’s not true,” he declares, with absolute and heartbreaking certainty. David…

David pulls up the hem of his shirt. Michael looks away. He’s sure David is gorgeous. He’s sure David in his right mind has no desire for Michael to see him shirtless. His pulse pounds through him anyway.

“Look,” David says now, and Michael can’t say no. David is tracing faint white circles, the only thing left from Michael shoving him onto those antlers. He wants to be sick even thinking about it, but that’s certainly not what David needs, and he wants even more to be what David needs. “You’ve hurt me.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Michael says, and surprisingly, he means it. If they fought now– the same fight, but _now_ after Michael has… started to care for David the way that he does, he might have let David win.

Except David said he’d only wanted Michael to join him. Fuck, he’d said he was trying to make Michael immortal, and didn’t want to kill him.

He can’t help noticing David is lean and muscular, lithe. A trail of blond hair…

“Are you sure you don’t want me?” 

Michael jolts and looks up at David, who’s watching him with half-closed yellow eyes and a smirk. “Wha– I never said I didn’t–”

David brightens.

Michael drops his head down on the bed and muffles a groan. What has this come to? All he did was talk to David by the tree.

Every night.

For almost a month straight.

And fall in love.

And possibly more importantly, _is this his fault?_

“You need to drink my blood.” He forces himself to focus on the problem at hand, even though his body is showing interest. He holds out his arm. “Here.”

David shakes his head and closes his eyes. “No. Tie me down. I’ll survive.”

“Will I be turned if you drink my blood?”

“No.”

“Will it hurt if you drink my blood?”

“Like a knife.”

Michael swallows. “Are you hurting right now?”

David’s expression twists in response, his body twitching. His nails are crusted with blood and his palms have nail-crescents pierced into them. “No,” says David. He’s lying, and it seems to be getting worse.

Michael remembers the piercing pain of bloodlust, and imagines it in David, rolling through in waves, and the way it felt as if his stomach would eat itself with serrated teeth.

“God,” Michael mutters. “Fuck, drink my fucking blood.”

“I don’t,” David says through gritted teeth, “want to hurt you.”

Something flutters and falls in Michael’s chest, falling, falling. The words take Michael’s breath away. Michael reaches over and opens the drawer by his bed, shuffling through the mess urgently. He can’t deal with this: David in pain, and saying things that would make Michael fall apart of David meant them.

He finds the Swiss Army knife he got a while ago and flips it open.

A line. 

He can’t see it, and he doesn’t know where his vein is, and he’s too impatient to look in a mirror, but he feels it. Warmth trickles down his neck, and when he touches his fingers to it, they come away stained red.

A line.

David’s yellow eyes fly open, his fangs out and then–

“Fuck you,” David grits out, and his features change.

A line.

It hurts. It hurts.

And then David’s hands, cold as ice, grasp the back of Michael’s neck and pull him in. He smells like smoke and blood, and the strong line of his body presses into Michael’s and–

_It hurts it hurts it hurts_

_It_

_Hurts._

David was right, Michael thinks, dizzy through the pain, _like a knife._

David is not careful or gentle or artful about it. He bites like an animal fighting for food. Michael can feel David’s cold mouth and teeth like serrated knives digging into his neck, can feel the claws that have burst out of David’s fingertips digging into the back of his neck and his bicep where David is grabbing him, and he can feel warm blood spilling down his neck and rushing dizzily through his veins like sheep following each other over a cliff to their deaths. 

Through the pain, Michael finds the clarity of mind to move his arms, cup the back of David’s neck and wrap his arm around David’s waist, and hold David there. 

Seconds go by, or minutes, or hours. Time slides into itself, just like the time he would spend with David by the tree. Blink, and five minutes. One moment stretching into an eternity. 

Michael thinks dimly that he might faint, and then he realizes he’s already pressed back against the pillow, his arms locked around David so that David has followed him down.

He feels weak and boneless and lightheaded, but the only thing that hurts is the knife-sharp pain in his neck. He would stay like this, endure this, he thinks sluggishly, if it alleviated David’s pain. He’d heal.

David’s hold on Michael’s neck and arm slacken, and the rhythmic jolts of pain from David’s swallowing slow, and slow, and slow, until David has collapsed over Michael, his chest pressed against Michael’s. 

A healthier color is returning to David’s skin.

Michael takes a deep breath, his chest feeling compressed under David’s weight and swallows. He’ll have to bandage up his neck.

He runs his fingers through David’s long, soft hair and–

David scrambles up, practically throwing himself off the bed and against the opposite wall, as far from Michael as it’s possible to be in this room.

“Fuck,” he croaks. His voice is rough and thick, throaty. “Fuck, Michael.” He looks so much better already– less pasty, no longer giddy with pain or weak and clumsy. He seems to have returned to himself, complete with his blue eyes and human features…

And his ever present desire to have nothing to do with Michael.

Michael manages to sit up, and his neck screams in protest– he never realized how many movements affected his neck before. With extreme pain, he’s able to pull off his black T-shirt and ball it up, pressing it against his neck.

It hurts like hell to speak, but he manages to ask, “Are you feeling better?”

“Am I feeling better,” David echoes. “ _Am I feeling better?_ Fuck, Michael.” He’s still pressed against the wall opposite of Michael. Michael aches. He doesn’t wish tired, pain dizzy David could come back, of course not. But he wishes… 

Well, it’s stupid. 

He just wishes David would care about him the way blood-deprived David cared about him. Where did that even come from? Lucy used to joke about how Michael would have no filter when he got sick– something about the body spending too much energy on fighting the sickness to spare much for thought or censorship, but he’s never heard of anyone just… just suddenly _caring_ about someone for no reason other than they’re weak and tired.

More than caring for.

 _Sleep with me, Michael_.

He’ll never get those words out of his head. 

Michael aches.

“Come here.” Michael waves at David in a _come hither_ movement. Blood is smeared against David’s pale skin, and some of his stubble is reddened with it. “You have blood on your face.”

“You have blood _all over you_ ,” David hisses. He sounds almost panicked. He sounds almost as if he cares. 

His eyes are blue and human, and he is watching Michael, watching Michael, watching.

Michael looks down at his own bare chest– David is right; there’s a thin river of blood running right down his chest, and there are smears of blood over much of his skin besides. 

“Can you smell the blood?” Michael can smell the blood, but David is on the other side of the room. David is still on the other side of the room. David still looks like he wants to run from Michael and never come back.

David closes his blue eyes. “Of course I can.” He doesn’t have his fangs out anymore. “I’m a vampire, Michael. I’m a vampire.”

Michael’s heart thrums. _And I still want you._ “I’ll clean it up, if it’s making you hungry.”

David is as fast and graceful as a whip, and in Michael’s mind, he is getting slammed up against a tree, but David stops just short of touching Michael, his eyes flashing, always catching in the light, always mocking or furious or both.

“I’m not,” he says in a low, terrible voice, “going to drink any more of your blood.”

He is trembling again, and Michael wants to hold him again, and he knows that David would hate nothing more than that, now that he’s back to himself again, so he doesn’t.

He reaches out and cups David’s chin, wiping away the blood there with his thumb. David lets him, but when the blood is gone, he pulls away.

“Okay,” Michael says. He doesn’t say _because you can’t bear me?_ He doesn’t say _because you hate it when I touch you and you hate it when I say your name and you hate me?_ He says, “Why?”

David makes a sound and drops onto the edge of Michael’s bed. He can’t go anywhere else with the sun still up– or he’d surely be flying away, out the window, miles away from Michael. Michael doesn’t even know why David came here in the first place. Regardless, he feels acutely as if he is trapping David. Caging him.

The sun is going down.

Michael wants the sun to finish setting just as much as he doesn’t. David will leave when the sun goes down, but is that any worse than David staying against his will? Michael thinks it might be better.

David doesn’t answer him. Instead, he says, “I need more blood.”

Michael says–

“Not yours,” David says. “Not you.” David still hasn’t said why.

“When the sun goes down, you can hunt.”

David laughs. “Are you telling me to kill someone?”

Michael’s pulse rushes, and his neck throbs. His heart is cold, so cold. It is black and shaking inside of him.

But he says, “If you need to.”

David laughs again. “I always need to.” He sounds bitter. 

When the sun goes down, David is out the window without a backwards glance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know I had to have a blood-drinking scene. It's obligatory. I may have enjoyed it quite a lot.


	6. i didn't have it in myself to go with grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why did Michael make David drink his blood? And why is David so mad about it? And what happened when David was dizzy and blood-deprived?
> 
> What happened, Michael?  
> What...?

**DAVID**

Michael finds him under an overhanging cliff even though the sun isn’t out– David doesn’t want to even be in the moonlight. He certainly doesn’t want to be at Star’s.

After Michael, the animal was still howling in his veins, wrenching at his control. Michael’s taste on his tongue was sweet and vibrant and David hated it, he hated it, and he felt as if he might drain Michael dry out of pure lack of control over his hunger. He won’t forget Michael’s blood for a long time, and he wants to wipe his mind clean. 

He should have just fed. How long had it been?

He drained someone else, but there’s still Michael in his mouth when Michael finds him. Michael is all over. His jacket around David’s shoulders and the echoing scent of him from spending all day in Michael’s bed and the taste of his blood on David’s lips, and his dark curls and the line of his jaw and his bare chest smeared red, filling David’s mind. 

Michael’s blood spilling out and staining his pillow.

David has shrugged off Michael’s jacket now, leaving it beside him on the rocks.

Michael brightens when he finds David, as if he’s been looking for a while. David tries not to feel anything, but something warm flutters in David anyway. He feels flushed with blood.

Michael looks at him for a moment; David can see the silhouette of him against the moonlit sea in the corner of his eye, not moving for a moment. David wonders what he looks like to Michael.

Pathetic.

In the middle of the night, a vampire’s most vibrant hour, lurking under a cliff and staring into the waves, arms around his knees like a little boy. A lost boy. 

Then Michael moves, with all the energy-bound gracelessness of a human, and joins him there on the rocks. He doesn’t say anything to David, just sits there next to David and watches the sea with him in silence. 

Michael’s silence feels sorry, and tentative. David only knows this from studying Michael for far longer than he’d care to admit. 

Finally, he looks at Michael. He cannot stand not looking at Michael– and Michael is not looking at the ocean, he is looking at David. He’s sitting with his legs out and his hands clasped in his lap, his whole body turned towards David just slightly. He looks like a Greek god under the moonlight, with his hair unruly and the strong line of his jaw. 

_It’s funny_ , David thinks, _now he’s the tired one with not enough blood._

And they have no one to blame but each other.

Michael has a new jacket, and it doesn’t smell like him– above the newness of it, David can barely catch Michael’s cologne at all.

“How’d you find me?” David asks finally.

“Just looking,” Michael waves a hand around. “Thought you’d be out on the boardwalk.”

They’re not far from the boardwalk now– occasionally, the screams of people on the rollercoaster reach them on the breeze, but the sounds of the waves wash them away. 

Michael blows out a breath, and David looks away, towards the ocean, away from the white bandage wrapped around Michael’s throat. 

“Are you going to tell me why you’re upset about drinking my blood, or do I have to guess?” Michael leans back against the rock behind them, but doesn’t take his eyes off David.

David drops his feet down and leans forward until Michael isn’t in his peripheral vision at all. “I told you I didn’t want to hurt you.”

He can hear Michael swallow. “It’s not lasting hurt. I’m going to be okay.”

“Did it hurt or not?”

“Were you hurting or not?”

David hisses through his teeth. “I can handle a little pain, Michael.” 

“Drinking my blood didn’t hurt me as much as not drinking it was hurting you.” Michael sounds so certain. 

David isn’t sure; he can’t remember much of the past twenty hours or so, except that Michael had cared for him kindly and then slashed himself open, bleeding all over the bed. 

He turns his head and raises his eyebrows at Michael. “And?”

Michael throws up his hands. “So why are you mad about it?” He leans forward, bringing them close. His eyes are dark glass-bottle blue and his hair looks soft, and thick, and the ends of his curls almost brush David’s shoulders.

There is a long silence.

David looks at him, and looks at him, and looks away. He shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he admits finally, which is the partial truth. “I told you I didn’t want to hurt you, and… you didn’t listen.”

Michael shifts, rocks scraping softly against each other under his boots. “I didn’t think you meant it.”

David frowns. “Why would I be lying, Michael?”

There is another long silence.

Waiting, David studies Michael. His brows are drawn together, as if he is both angry and at a loss. For someone who speaks both little and with little thought, he seems to give his answer unusual consideration.

“Michael?” David presses. Michael tips his head at his name, but doesn’t respond. David asks, “Why would I be lying?”

“You were acting– pretty fucking weird, David.” He runs his fingers over his jaw in what David has learned is a habitual movement. “You didn’t exactly seem yourself.”

Embarrassingly, the first thing that comes to mind is whether David did anything humiliating while sleep and blood deprived, a combination he doesn’t have much experience with. He can’t quite remember how he felt, except that aside from his agonizing stomach, he’d felt pleasant– or at least, pleasantly absent.

“Who did I seem like?” He tries to keep his voice low, even. 

Michael won’t look at him. Michael is a terrible liar, David has learned, with the most painfully obvious tells. “You were just– different, that’s all.”

David just waits. And watches. Michael is a guilty liar, and he will fix his own lies pretty quickly. David only ever loses the waiting game to Star.

After longer than David expected, Michael caves. “You just cared about me a bit.”

 _Oh no._ David raises his eyebrows at Michael and tips his head as if he is only curious and not panicked, his mind tumbling, grasping at hazy memories. “Oh? Did I say something to you, Michael?”

Michael shifts again. If David was perhaps… part of Michael’s life, he would have to teach Michael to be less obvious. “It’s not a big deal,” Michael promises unconvincingly. “Definitely not a big deal.”

 _It is to me. Hell, Michael. Anything to do with you is a big fucking deal to me._ But David just lets him finish, and tries to douse the spark of impatience flaring in his chest. 

“Look, the point is, you were acting like you cared about me, and I figured if you were sober, you wouldn’t mind drinking my blood.”

David lets that settle for a moment, and then repeats, “Sober?”

“Well-slept. Not hungry.” Michael waves his hand with an impatient shrug. “Shit, whatever. You were acting drunk.”

“Michael…” David sing-songs. “Are you keeping secrets?”

“You asked me to sleep with you.”

There is the longest silence yet.

Michael does not look at David. David cannot look away from Michael, but he cannot read him either. He had asked Michael _what?_ Fuck. Godfuckingdammit. 

_What?_

“Among other things,” Michael finally mumbles.

David pounces on it. “What other things?”

“What, you want me to list them?” Michael asks sarcastically. 

David says _yes_ because he is a masochist. And he _desperately_ wishes he hadn’t, by the end of it. _Do you worry about me, Michael?_ The terrified, the afraid he felt before returns in full. _Tie me up_ accompanied with a wink. _Are you sure you don’t want me?_

_I’m so afraid of you._

“What did you mean by that?” Michael flicks the collar of his new jacket. David doesn’t like it; it covers Michael’s jawline. “I’m not very frightening, am I?”

David shrugs. “Who knows what I meant?” David does. David knows exactly what he meant.

“So what did you do?” David asks, after yet another long silence.

Michael looks at him, his face flushed and horrified. “I didn’t rape you, if that’s what your asking.” He looks so young and hurt. “I wouldn’t–”

“No, Michael. Did you say nothing to me at all?” David cannot imagine Michael simply taking these comments in stride, without either kind lies to shut David up or threats to shut David up. If only out of morbid curiosity, David finds he wants to know which one. He smirks. “Even after I asked you to sleep with me?”

Michael looks away from him. 

The pair of them, David thinks with flat amusement. They can’t look at each other for more than five seconds without stopping. Michael is always lying, and David is always overdosing on Michael.

“I said… things.” Michael says. “I said– I told you– I told you ‘maybe when you get better.’”

 _Huh_ , David says, only his throat doesn’t work, and Michael sits there in the longest silence they’ve had yet, biting his lip very hard. It’s the kind of pause Michael has when he’s about to blurt out something else.

And Michael bursts out with, “I told you I wished you wanted it for real.”

There is more silence. 

God, there is so much silence. 

David wants to scream into it. He wants to move. He wants to lose himself in Michael right here under the dark cliff in the middle of the night. 

But he just stares. He can’t move. 

What–

What did Michael–

His mouth isn’t working. 

_Michael?_

But Michael loves Star– and Michael never– and–

Michael gets up abruptly, stones clattering loudly as they skitter, and he’s up, his movements panicky and directionless. He stumbles to the shoreline and he stands there.

His curls in the wind, his hands in his pockets.

 _David wants him_.

“Michael,” David says. He can say Michael’s name. Hell knows he can say Michael’s name. Louder, “Michael.”

He follows, just as panicked, even though Michael isn’t moving.

Michael’s shoulders are rigid, his jaw clenched. He looks… afraid.

He doesn’t try to stay away from Michael; he steps close enough to feel Michael’s warmth. 

“Why do you think I wanted you then?” he whispers, breathless and fast, but he’s too impatient to wait for Michael to answer. His voice trembles, urgent. “Because I didn’t have the energy to pretend anymore.” 

And before Michael can even take a breath–

David kisses him.

He kisses Michael fast and soft, a quick brush of lips, and another, and another. Michael’s lips are so soft, his skin so warm beneath David’s hands when he brings them to Michael’s face.

For a moment, Michael is still– and then he is pressing back, his lips parting to catch David’s mouth, his kisses breathy, and gentle, a whisper, a question– and then harder. David is falling apart. There is nothing– not killing or drinking or speeding on his bike that holds a candle to this feeling. 

He pulls David closer with a shaky breath, fists in David’s shirt collar, and he tips his head, and his mouth is so warm, and his kisses are so fierce. This is burning inside out from the feeling inside his chest, and David will gladly burn.

David can’t do anything but clutch him back and hope– fuck how he hopes– that Michael can understand how he feels. How much he feels.

He can feel Michael’s human heart pounding against his own chest, can feel the slide of Michael’s hands as they slip into his hair and press against the small of his back. 

Michael pulls away from the kiss with a gentleness that doesn’t match the kiss, his breath shaky and warm. He keeps his forehead pressed to David’s as if he can’t be bothered to move. David hopes he never does. 

Through long immortal years, David learned to sail through time with grace, but now he wants to pull it all to a screeching halt and stay here, _right here_ , with Michael’s wonder-wide eyes gazing into his own.

“Michael,” he manages to whisper. And then he laughs, bright and spontaneous. It bubbles out of him from the fountain of euphoria in his chest, right where he was so afraid the wanting fire would burn him down.

Michael’s face melts into a smile, all eagerness and aching sincerity. “God,” he murmurs, “God, David.”

He says David’s name as if David, too, is a god, and David must kiss him again. He could not bear to not kiss him again. Michael doesn’t give any protest, and the incoming tide sweeps around their shoes as time drips away.

Michael kisses down the corner of David’s mouth. “That was a little bit…” He bites his lip, staring at David’s lips. He’s gone from searing want, arms locking around David and mouth pressed to David’s with bare minimum breaks for air, to uncertainty, suddenly, in a blink. “Out of nowhere, isn’t it?”

So uncertain. Unsteady and wrong, as if he’s certain something is wrong but he can’t put his finger on it. Michael’s hand finds David’s, but it doesn’t counteract the drop of David’s stomach as Michael steps away.

He looks as if he’s been glamored or enthralled, and the spell has broken. David wouldn’t enthrall Michael; it wouldn’t be real.

David pulls his hand from Michael’s and throws it around Michael’s shoulders– it feels better that way; they’re closer. He can sense Michael’s heartbeat, skipping. “Nowhere, huh? Why do you say that?”

Michael huffs out a laugh, almost frustrated. The roar of the boardwalk rushes to meet them as they wander away from David’s sad little cove and onto the open beach, making Michael raise his voice. “You didn’t exactly seem interested before tonight.” His voice teeters the edge of casual. He nudges David’s shoulder with his own. “What changed?”

They must look like friends, just two reckless teenagers, shoving each other playfully, teasing. Some of the quiet, contained intimacy of the moment is drowned out by everybody else. 

They crossed the line… and now they’re going back, toeing the line and eyeing the other side again– at least, David thinks Michael might be.

“You.” Someone dashes across the beach, waving a branch on fire they must have taken from a bonfire, and Michael’s eyes follow it. David’s eyes follow Michael. “You wanted it.”

Michael frowns, slipping his hands back into his pockets. Maybe his hands are cold (although Michael is always _so warm_ to David), or maybe he just wants to put his arm between them, making David’s arm around his shoulders awkward. 

David drops it with what he thinks is considerable casual grace, clapping Michael on the shoulder until they’re not touching at all, simply walking side by side on a crowded beach. 

“So,” Michael’s shoulders are tense again. “You’re into me because I’m into you. And if that guy was into you–” He points to the idiot with the burning branch, who’s accidentally caught fire and drops and rolls as they watch.

“No, Michael,” David interrupts, grinning at Michael. “He’s playing with fire. I couldn’t be with someone like that. I’m a vampire.”

“David.” Michael doesn’t seem amused. “I’m serious. Do you care about me or do you not?”

“And does love exist? And is the soulmate bond a real thing? And how much is a good smoke in Cali?” David doesn’t know why it’s so hard to just reassure Michael. He already said he’s cared the whole time. Or, he implied it. “Yes. And no, and I don’t know.”

Micahel’s jaw works, his eyes dark. Michael seems to have figured out that David sidesteps, sometimes very obviously, giving answers he doesn’t want to give… but he’s clearly come to the wrong conclusion as to which answer David is trying not to give. 

_I love you_.

He’s trying to give it. He’s trying to say it. But he isn’t saying it.

“So you get people to– and then– why? For fun?” Michael demands, dark and angry. “Just find someone who wants– you know. For the night. Or do you get off on someone caring about– I don’t get it.”

David just lets this happen. And then, because he doesn’t know what to say, he smiles. “Do you want to try saying that again?”

Michael makes an angry sound in his throat–

And he kisses David.

It is not a nice kiss, or a gentle kiss like the ones they exchanged at the edge of the water. It’s hard and angry, and open mouthed and burning. It’s furious. Michael’s nails bite into David’s arms– he left Michael’s jacket on the rocks– and their teeth clack.

David pulls away as quickly as he comes to his senses, which isn’t very quickly at all. His mind feels muddled, on fire, whirling and hazy. And wanting. And furious, so furious at himself. 

Why are the words so hard? 

_I love you_.

He says, “You’ll make me bleed.” _And then you’ll be a vampire again._

Michael understands. Another contradiction, David knows. _Be one of us–_ and then don’t. _I don’t care_ and then _careful with your teeth._

 _I love you_. The words are so big inside of him. 

He hasn’t said them in decades, and before then he was young and stupid, really, actually, truly eighteen. He isn’t that old, not really. Not enough to know how to say these words.

Michael is staring at David with a faintly sick look in his eyes, as if he can’t imagine what he was thinking. As if he has taken a baseball bat to his bedroom and is now looking at the mess, angry at himself and empty enough of the previous anger to wonder why he did it. 

“‘Night, David.” 

David is surprised Michael turns instead of beating David to Hell. It reminds him of so many nights. He doesn’t _want_ those nights back, he wants _this_.

He wants what _this_ was just half an hour ago, before Michael made a stupid assumption… and David encouraged it.

Again.

He _said_ he cared about Michael before; why does Michael even– but it’s not Michael’s fault. David hasn’t even stopped him. 

And Michael isn’t standing still by the shoreline anymore, he is walking away from David.

They’re on a crowded beach, so David can’t fly. He just runs.

Michael’s sleeve is stiff and new, the jacket unworn. 

“Stop.”

Michael doesn’t stop; he is walking quickly, going up the stairs that will take them up from the beach onto the street. He looks angry– angry and hurt. He doesn’t look at David at all, and Michael is always staring. 

David casts around for something to say. “I killed someone,” he blurts.

Michael’s jaw just tightens; he doesn’t slow or turn, and he answers uncaringly and abruptly. “You did taste like blood.”

They reach the street, and Michael weaves through the people, and David follows. It feels like he’s suddenly been thrown back a month and he’s Michael and Michael is Star. 

“Stop following me,” Michael mutters, and it shouldn’t be audible over the people, but past midnight the crowds are beginning to thin, and David can hear what most can’t.

Michael is clumsy at navigating the crowds and David has woven his way through people at night for longer than Michael has been alive. He catches Michael. 

“Let me talk to you,” he says. “Come on, Michael, stop. It’s been a long fucking time.”

“Fuck, David,” Michael shouts at him, and grabs him by the wrist and yanks him down the street, fishing for something in his pocket until he manages to unlock into a nearby closed store.

David’s whole body goes cold. He knows which fucking store this is. _Vampires Everywhere!_ sits at the front in all of its blood-and-fire glory.

“You want to talk? Talk.”

Dwayne and Paul and Marko scream and roar and ask him, in the flickering fire of the hotel before it all happened, why he’s so interested in Michael anyway. Rows and rows of peaceful comic books, piles of them, filled with vampires getting staked and painted in holy water. Just like Marko, just like Paul, just like Dwayne. 

“What?” Michael pushes. “What’s been a fucking long time?”

David shakes his head. “I don’t want to be here.” His chest feels tight, something in it ricocheting around inside of his lungs, panicked, and under it, viciously furious. 

Michael doesn’t even seem to notice. “Stop avoiding the subject, goddammit–”

“I don’t–” but his voice is shaking, and he stops trying.

He finds, in his jeans, and old lighter, and flicks it.

Maybe Michael moves, maybe he doesn’t; David isn’t watching him. 

The bonfire roars, and Paul’s victim screams and Marko targets the neck, his victims silent, and Dwayne has morbid fun watching the man stumble and run before he strikes, and then they’re all dead. 

He can’t be here and _not do anything_.

He drops the lighter, and he leaves.

The bonfire roars.

There are no screams. The building’s empty.

Michael makes it out of course– they were both close to the door– but he doesn’t follow David; he’s cursing and running to the Frog’s house, shoving people out of the way.

In the end, David learns, the front display burns down, both the vampire comics and the wooden shelves nothing but ash, and the next display down, superman comics, are either wet or partially burned, but the building is fine.

He doesn’t hear it from Star, because he doesn’t want to know what she and Michael are saying about him, and he knows that both her incessant pressing or her silence would break him down. 

He doesn’t hear it from Michael; he doesn’t go back to the tree or stay awake in the day, and Michael doesn’t try to find him at night.

He hears it from snatches of conversation as people walk past the store or as he weaves his way through the boardwalk, picking out kills. 

At least Michael has given him that; after their night, David’s qualms about going back to the boardwalk to kill without the Lost Boys have faded just as much as the scent of Michael on Michael’s jacket, cast on the rocks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For your information, that was unplanned. The arson wasn't going to happen and Michael and David were just going to be happy. My hand slipped.


	7. i loved you, i swear i loved you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally, some honest talking. God, Michael is so in love. God.

**MICHAEL**

“David,” Michael mutters, heading home. “Goddammit, David.”

The Frogs were kind to him, but the Frog brothers have informed Michael that in no uncertain terms do they believe his story. They’re peering out at him from the doorway of the store, sharing their signature suspicious looks. It would be comical except that it’s Michael they are suspicious of.

He brings the partially-scorched vampire comic books that won’t sell home to Sam.

Sam has _somehow_ gotten it into his mind that Michael’s secret boyfriend set the fire, and while he promised not to tell, it eats at Michael. Is it that obvious?

“I just dropped my lighter,” Michael groans around his spaghetti. “C’mon mom, not you too.”

“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Sam defends Michael eagerly, and that’s even _worse_ because Sam is only doing it because he thinks it’s _romantic_ that Michael is covering for his boyfriend, and he ‘wants to help.’

His mom shakes his head at him. “Michael, I’m _worried_ about you,” she informs him earnestly. “Did you break up with Star? You can talk to me, you know.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Michael mutters. “I wouldn’t set a store on fire just because I broke up with Star.”

Sam nods knowingly. “But he did break up with Star.”

“ _Sam_.”

“Oh, honey.”

“It’s nothing, Mom.”

Lucy clasps her hands and looks over the table at him sternly, but he’s over it by now. Eighteen and fucking so out of her realm out of reality. Eighteen and in love with an angry vampire arsonist who only wants him for– what, his hands and his mouth? “You look tired, Michael. Did you sleep alright? Do you want me to talk to her?”

“No, God, Mom. Do not talk to Star.” He almost smiles. He is… mostly over it. But it’s nice to have someone so worried about him.

Sam follows him after dinner. “So what really happened, Mikey?” Sam follows him into his room, and Michael doesn’t have enough energy to stop him.

“You already asked.” Michael closes the door behind Sam, who doesn’t seem to care– he’s staring behind Michael. 

Michael turns… “Sam,” he says, “please don’t scream.”

He forgot to change the sheets and the pillowcase. After wrapping himself up, going to find David in the pebbled cove, kissing and the fire… he had just collapsed and slept like a rock. 

And then went straight to the Frogs’ to tell them his version of the story, which took a very long time because of the brothers’ extensive cross-examination. He might have even misremembered his story a couple of times because the boys exchanged dark looks several times.

The white sheets are stained with blood that has browned with sunlight and time, and it’s all over the pillowcase in a thick puddle shape, smeared over the sheets like he’s been involved with some sort of ritual sacrifice.

“Does this…” Sam makes a squeaky noise. “Have anything to do with that fire?”

“No, definitely not.” Michael throws the blankets over the pillow. “Don’t tell Mom, alright?” 

Sam’s eyes widen, and he grabs the Swiss Army knife on the top of Michael’s bedside drawers. “Did someone _stab_ you in the ne– wait, you’re lying.”

“I’m definitely not lying.” Michael crosses his heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” 

Sam makes his face. “That’s doesn’t even mean anything. Is your boyfriend…” his face gets a little horrified. “You know, one of _those_ people?” He runs the knife over his arm in demonstration.

Michael chokes on air. “No, Sam. He’s not a sadist. If anything, he’s a masochist. Get out of my room, God.”

“What’s a ma–”

“Fuck, shit,” Michael shouts, his face flushing, “out! I didn’t say anything!”

“Language!” Lucy calls from somewhere downstairs. 

Eyes wide, Sam lowers his voice. “Will you introduce me to your bloody fire-setting boyfriend? He sounds like such a _badass_. How did your stupid self land him?” He winks to show he’s joking.

Michael swallows. He didn’t land him. Fuck, he really didn’t.

Sam frowns a little when Michael doesn’t laugh. “I’m joking, Mike. He’s the lucky one, you know that, right?”

“You wouldn’t like him,” Michael says. Not that he and David are boyfriends.

“I promise to like him.”

Michael gives up. “Well, he doesn’t like me.” He grimaces at Sam and pushes him out the door. It’s bittersweet, the way Sam’s mouth falls open, as if he honestly hadn’t even considered that. It’s sweet. “Out.”

Sam stops in the doorway, wavering there. “Sorry, Mike.”

“Eh.” Michael turns away and starts stripping off the sheets. “It wasn’t going to happen.”

God, it wasn’t. David doesn’t want a boyfriend, he wants a worshipper.

Well, he has one, but Michael has no intentions of letting David know. Michael has no intentions of speaking to David at all.

It’s just, Star takes one look at him and informs him she’s done with his problems, and what else is he supposed to do with his night?

David isn’t there, so he checks along the rocky shoreline under the cliffs a long way in both directions– because he’s bored, that’s all. 

Someone screams, and he looks up– for a moment he thinks one of the beach bonfires has caught onto someone else, but that’s not it. Michael’s stomach sinks and turns. 

He can’t look away: David flies off with her, a black shape and a white dress against the sky; the night is too black to catch the deep red color of blood, but Michael’s mind fills it in for him. It’s fast– faster than David drank Michael’s blood, and David only drank some of Michael’s blood– and then David drops the body right into the sea.

Michael stumbles a little farther back under the cliff, back in the cove where he and David… back into the cove from before, until he can’t see the beach anymore. But he can see David, blotting out a sliver of stars, his arms pale and bare. Michael’s jacket is still on the rocks.

David lands with a little bit of a stumble, as if he’s heavier than he was ready for, maybe due to the new blood. 

He looks up.

His grey-blue eyes, pale like thick arctic ice, blood on his chin, on his lips. Michael still wants to lick it off. His lips part, and he stands there against the sky for a moment before walking in, right past Michael, and sits on Michael’s jacket. He wipes his chin, but he misses some of the blood. Michael still wants to cup David’s face and wipe it away with his thumb.

He just stands there, looking down at David. “David.”

David flinches. “What is it?”

“The shop’s okay.”

“I know.” David is utterly, utterly still.

“But my family’s convinced I have a romantic secret because I’m lying to cover for you, and they can tell.”

“Thanks,” David says softly. 

“And I’m sorry for bringing you to the Frog’s shop. I wasn’t thinking.” _About anything but you, and how much I was hurting._ “And thank you, I guess, for not killing them. I know you want to.”

David looks up at him. Michael falls in love again; he looks like a lost boy, young. He fucking isn’t. “Is that it?”

Michael tells himself not to humiliate himself any further, but of course his mouth doesn’t listen. “I miss you.”

David shivers, and his face opens. It is _so tender_. He is looking at Michael as if Michael is everything that matters. It breaks Michael’s heart.

 _And somehow, I still love you_. Michael realizes he’s staring. “That’s all.”

He’s about to move, he’s about to leave– he really is– but David looks down, and David says a lot of things he doesn’t want to say with his head down. 

So he stays.

Not because David is still beautiful, or because Sam believes Michael’s good enough and he thinks maybe David could think that too, one day. No, that’s not why. 

“Do you remember when you asked me how old I was?”

Michael remembers. “Yeah. You didn’t answer.”

David swallows. “No, I didn’t. I’m not that old, actually. Eternally eighteen, but literally…” he pauses, counting on his fingers. Michael almost wants to laugh. Almost. He’s adorable. “Fifty-five.”

“So about forty as a vampire.” Michael thinks for a moment. “And you actually were alive when Einstein was alive.” 

“Hush,” David mutters, “I’m younger.”

Michael can’t help but laugh, then, just the whisper of a laugh, but a laugh still, and David looks up at him quickly, smiling. God, he looks so shy and proud. He _changes_ so much. 

“Do you remember,” David murmurs, not looking away, “When you asked me why I was afraid of you?”

“Yeah.” Michael gives up telling himself he’s going to walk away from David. He sits. “You didn’t answer that either.”

David opens his mouth, but then he shakes his head. “Do you want to guess?” 

“No. I want you to tell me.”

David’s eyebrows pull together, but the corners of his mouth twitch. “Yeah. That’s a good idea, isn’t it?” And then he leans in and kisses Michael.

If he tasted like blood before, he does now tenfold, and somehow he still tastes sweet. His mouth is cold, and his eyelashes brush Michael’s cheeks, and the kiss is so strange. It is as if David can’t help himself and at the same time is not sure about it at all, gentle and decisive both.

Michael kisses him back for a blissful moment, and then, in a breath, he places a hand on David’s chest. “Stop,” he whispers, against David’s soft lips, “Stop.”

David stops, his cold hands still on Michael’s neck, and then he pulls back into himself. His arms loop around his knees. He is shaking. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m– sorry. For trying to turn you against your will. Max wanted me to, and I just… I’m sorry for going after you.”

Michael resists the urge to touch his tingling lips. “Is this your way of saying you regret meeting me?”

“No,” David laughs, humorlessly self-deprecating. “It’s– really not. And I’m sorry for making you think that I… could regret– Michael, I don’t regret meeting you.”

Michael’s heart skips in his chest. He aches, he’s aching. He’s always aching. “That’s good.”

Michael feels as if nothing will matter as this moment does, but he doesn’t know why he feels that way– perhaps it’s the way David looking at him that makes his heart race in his chest. David’s eyes are wide, and ice blue, fixed on Michael. 

“And I’m sorry. Michael.” David’s body is still again, like carved marble under the moonlight. Even his spiky hair and black T-shirt don’t make him any less lovely. “Because I’m shit at saying…” 

David looks young and scared. So scared, and Michael takes David’s hands, unwinding David out of his little ball. He holds David’s hand, acutely aware of the way David doesn’t pull away this time.

“I love you,” David says.

 _I love you_. 

Michael’s heart stops altogether. “David?” he whispers, without even thinking, but David is already talking. 

It’s as if that four-letter word has been clogging up David’s throat and now, suddenly, he is talking, tripping over his words like water racing over itself on its haste over the edge. 

“ _I love you_ ,” David says again, his body sagging into Michael’s. Their foreheads press together, and David’s hands hold Michael’s face, fingers shaky. “My whole life, Michael, I’ve never– sometimes I never told them, or sometimes I didn’t mean it, but I never– not since before I was a vampire, but _I mean it now_. All these fucking years, Michael.” 

Michael laughs, more air than sound, barely aware of himself. He puzzles through this spill of words and feels as if he has been set on fire. “ _David_ ,” he murmurs. 

He likes the name in his mouth. He likes the way David smiles when he says it, a smile Michael has never seen before. Bright, and bashful, and _happy._ He likes _David_.

“It’s not funny,” David whispers, but he’s smiling too, he’s smiling so wide. “I thought it was going to destroy me, Michael. Do you understand?” He swallows, serious. “It terrified me to hell.”

Michael cups David’s face and wipes that stupid, adorable streak of blood off his chin with his thumb and pretends not to notice that David’s eyes are watery. 

David doesn’t do him the same courtesy. “You look like you’re going to fucking cry.”

Michael laughs and slaps David’s shoulder gently. He’s weak, boneless with the warmth in his chest; it’s a star, a fucking supernova, and he doesn’t think he could stand if he wanted to. He doesn’t, though. David’s here, the shape of him pressed against Michael’s body, and even David’s sharp, bony elbow in his side can’t make him want to move. 

“Shut up.” He wipes his eyes. “I– what happened the other night?”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t say it.” David’s cheeks are pink. God, David’s cheeks are pink, and he looks so sweet.

The moonlight is white, and the pebbles around them are the dark, shining gray of wet rock; it can’t possibly be the lighting. “You’re _blushing_ ,” Michael declares, feeling young and not minding, not really. 

David’s flush gets deeper, but his smile fades a little. “I just fed, so I have… more blood.”

“Oh.” Michael’s heart hurts. He feels guilty again, and he remembers David’s expression when he asked David whether he would kill someone, every night. “Well, it makes us even.”

David looks pleased, his smile returning. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” His eyes flick down to Michael’s chest, and he runs a hand down it.

Michael’s breath catches, his heart pounding, David grinning down at him, flicking open Michael’s jacket. Oh, God. David will be the death of him, David and that filthy smile.

“I can hear your heartbeat you know,” David says conversationally, his hand tracing paths of fire. “So…”

Michael makes a noise and catches David’s hand. “Come on, tell me about it. How long have you been secretly in love with me?” He tries for teasing; he fails. 

He’s sure he’s bright red to match David, and with a shaky voice besides, but he’s still getting used to the idea. The words feel strange and foreign on his tongue. _In love with me._ David, in love with him. To think that the night of the fire, David was in love with him and he had no idea. In retrospect, David had seemed genuine that night, if completely cold on previous nights.

David kicks his feet out and grins. “Fishing for compliments? When you fall in love, try to pinpoint exactly when you go over the edge. Harder than it sounds.” He doesn’t exactly nail causal either, his voice hesitating over the words _fall in love_ and ruining his teasing effect. 

They are both trying to have a normal conversation and accidentally setting them both alight. The words give Michael’s heart wings; they flutter in his chest until his heart goes flying.

“I’m just wondering,” Michael insists, although of course, it’s more than that. To know what he got wrong, to know what was right there in his blind spots– perhaps a reassurance. It is hard to think of David loving him even now, even knowing that he does, when the only things that support it are three days and a half. 

Perhaps David can tell; he’s always watching Michael, and sometimes Michael gets the feeling David has begun to learn him like a language, the kind of thought that makes him immediately stop thinking. There’s sweetly romantic and there’s downright foolish.

Whatever his reason, David’s expression settles into something more serious and thoughtful. “I don’t… tell me something about you first.” He looks faintly embarrassed, his eyes once more in his pale hands, clasped in his lap. 

Michael wonders again about the hotel, and whether David will ever go back to get his gloves and other things, or if they will forever be left, a cavernous time-capsule.

“I think about you a lot,” he offers. David stares at him until he flushes. “Obviously, but. I… when you would meet me by the tree, it was my favorite part of the day. When you came to my window, it was ridiculous.”

David tips his head, his eyebrows rising. “Why?”

Michael shakes his head. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Come on, Michael,” David coaxes. “What was ridiculous? Don’t tell me my drunk flirting worked.”

Michael’s cheeks burn. David’s so close, his smiling lips and his thin hands. He has thin, small hands, almost spindly, and they run through Michael’s hair. 

“It did,” he tries to say with dignity, but David is already laughing. “Fuck you, David. It was terrible because I thought, you know. I thought you hated me. I wanted you to mean it so bad.” His voice catches.

David’s laughter softens, though he’s still smiling. “I may not have been friendly,” he admits, “But I wasn’t that hostile, was I?” He frowns, then. “Was I?”

“David.” Michael can’t even. “You were cold as ice. Always at least five feet away. Never let me say your name.”

David’s cheeks flush again. Michael could live off of the tangible satisfaction of making David flush. David taps his temple. “Why do you think that is, Michael? Use your brain.”

... _Oh_. 

“You…” Michael realizes. It’s an inexplicable relief. “It was _me._ ”

“ _Bingo_ ,” David murmurs, and they both laugh. Michael is so glad he told David what happened in their bedroom, or they never would have kissed in the first place. 

Michael wonders if David can hear it pattering against his chest now that David is leaning back and Michael is a good foot away from him. He wants to bridge the distance; his body calls for David’s lean lines and cool skin. 

David licks his bottom lip almost absently, as if wondering if there might be blood, and want spills in Michael like newspaper catching. He can’t possibly imagine a better thing to do with their mouths than kissing except for this: figuring out, once and for all, how much of their history he has completely misread.

He kisses the corner of David’s mouth, and then kisses David for real. David pulls him close, pressing their bodies together, his cool skin against Michael’s flush and his cold mouth opening eagerly. His eyelashes and stubble brush against Michael’s skin. He still tastes sugary sweet and bloody at once. It feels like a first kiss all over again– the first time he’s absolutely sure what it means.

“You just let me believe all you wanted was sex.” 

“I don’t know why you jumped to conclusions.”

Michael raises his eyebrows. “Because you let me believe them.” 

“I said what changed was that you wanted me back. That’s as clear as it gets, Michael.”

Michael snorts, and then they’re laughing. “It’s really, really not. You know exactly what it sounded like.”

David just leans into him, pressing Michael against the hard, irregular rocks. Michael finds he doesn’t mind so much. “Who could blame me? You’ve got the looks of a Greek god.”

Warmth in Michael’s heart trickles down to pool in his lower stomach. He hadn’t considered that part yet; David… thinking of him like that. David laughs at his interest.

“And you look seventeen,” Michael tells him. “It’s your face.” 

David turns his head on Michael’s chest and raises his eyebrows. “What about my face? It’s only a one year difference.”

The cool night feels warm, so warm. He pushes off his jacket, and David makes a noise of protest, but quickly sits up when he realizes the disturbance means Michael’s jacket is coming off. He lays it behind himself to cushion his back.

“You don’t look sweet, but your face does.” 

David gives him a skeptical look. 

“You look like a virgin,” Michael says bluntly. 

David grins and kisses Michael, open-mouthed and filthy. “Looks can be deceiving. You look like you could be a fucking One Percenter but you’re very tame.”

“ _Very tame?_ ”

There is more kissing after that, and a little bit of rolling. David concedes that Michael is not always tame, and with a little sideways glance, his eyelashes casting shadows over his cheeks, he admits he likes it that way.

“I’m glad you came,” David says, smiling a cat’s smile, stretching. The sun will come up soon, and Michael may have slept well into the afternoon before visiting the Frogs’, but he yawns. His sleep schedule, by now, is completely fucked. “I would have bet my life savings I’d scared you off for good.”

“Do you have life savings?”

David tips his head, rolling his neck– presumably stretching, but likely for Michael’s benefit. “In the hotel.”

It’s a conversational dead end; David never speaks of the other Lost Boys, a look that breaks Michael’s heart flashing over his face every time they’re mentioned. 

Michael moves gently away from it. “I missed you. My brother wanted to meet my secret boyfriend, which I told him I didn’t have. Mom was sure I broke it off with Star and set the fire because I got pissed, and I think Star got tired of my vampire questions. She wouldn’t even let me in.”

David seems to fold in, his knees coming up and his arms drawing to his chest. “Right, your girlfriend.”

And Michael remembers David saying something similar at the gate, when Michael sent him off. _Hi, Star, your boyfriend sent me._ This time, he does say it: “She’s not my girlfriend.”

David’s shoulders are still stiff, his eyes following the water in and out and in and out. There is quiet for a moment. “You know, I never told you much about the boys.”

“Yeah?” Michael sits up. He wants to know everything, absolutely everything about David. Guilt floods him, pulling him under, but he tries to let it settle, tries to swallow it. The Lost Boys were a big part of David, and he’s speaking of them now. “I didn’t think you wanted to talk about them.”

David spoke carefully, almost flatly. His fingers tapped on his knee as he watched the sea move. “Marko loved Paul. He really did. And they were the worst.” He smiles sadly. “Truly terrible. The hotel is surrounded by rock, Michael. It echoes. But sometimes they wanted to have…” He turns to Michael and pronounces the words in a way that sends a warm shiver down Michael’s spine. “More fun.”

Whatever Michael was expecting– their killing habits? Their party habits? Who rode the fastest and who didn’t like racing at all?– but it wasn’t their sex lives. 

David’s eyes flick down, over Michael. “So Paul invited me.” He grins, and blinks, letting his yellow eyes come out. Blinks again, and they’re gone. The expression on his face is so purely wanting. He shifts moods like a chameleon.

Michael, warmth building unbearably in his stomach, catches David’s chin in one hand and kisses him, turning them both in one movement so that David slides onto his lap, tangling them. David makes a soft hiss as his knee hits a rock, but he doesn’t stop kissing Michael for more than a breath. He kisses back like he’s trying to drink Michael in without ever piercing his skin. 

“David,” he groans, his breath coming short. David’s body is moving, and it isn’t helping. “Whatever you’re trying to say, just say it.”

David’s eyes are blue again, fire and ice at once. He kisses Michael’s neck, and Michael is unsure whether it’s because he wants to or because he doesn’t want Michael to see his face.

“Don’t bite,” Michael jokes.

“No promises.” He can feel David grin against his skin; he can feel David’s cool breath and cold mouth. “I’m saying I don’t mind being second choice. But with this–” His hand, down, down. “Don’t you dare keep me off the ticket.”

Michael’s blood freezes, his gut black. Michael pushes David back, ignoring David’s sound of protest. He makes sure to look David in the eye. “David,” he says clearly, “You are not my second choice.”

David looks back at him. His eyes are too warm and too soft to be ice. “Well.”

Michael traces the shape of David’s lips with his thumb. He cannot keep his hands off, and he doesn’t want to try. “I think we’re Paul and Marko.”

David raises his eyebrows. “And Star is our David?”

Snickering, Michael says, “We don’t need a David.” But apprehension flutters in him, growing cold. David is a people person. He had Dwayne, Paul, and Marko for a long time, he thinks. If he’s right. And he had Star, too, for however long. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, he has no one but Michael. How can Michael possibly fill that void on his own? How can Michael possibly be enough?

Perhaps he isn’t. David loved his Lost Boys. That’s what Star said. Plural. He loved them all– and maybe not the way he loves Michael now, or maybe he did– but whatever the case, he had more, before. 

Perhaps he wants more now.

David’s laugh is bright. “Everyone needs a David. David is always needed.”

Michael breathes deeply, in, out. “I love you too.” It’s such an easy thing to say, now that David has gone first. “If you couldn’t tell.”

He is saying it because it is true. He means it. Of course he means it. But perhaps he is also saying it for David. To spread himself out and root himself in David, to try to fill as much of the hole in David’s heart as he can. Is it enough?

But of he is mostly saying it because he means it.

Isn’t he?

This is silence. 

David pushes himself up off of Michael, and the rocks dig into Michael’s back. He studies Michael. Watching. Always watching.

“You’re not kidding,” he says finally. 

“No,” Michael says. He likes the words, so he says them again. “I love you. And I don’t want to share you. I mean it. I don’t want a David.”

David raises his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

Something turns in Michael’s stomach, upsetting the unease that has settled there and sending it up again. “What, do _you_ want a David?”

“No, I meant whether you were sure you loved me.” David still isn’t hitting casual. “I was joking. You sound very sure.”

But Michael says it again, just in case. “I _am_ very sure.”

“Good. If you were joking, I think I’d kill you.” David smiles sharply, but his cheeks are flushed and his eyes are bright. The sound of the waves can’t drown out his wonder. 

“Shouldn’t I be the one afraid of you?” Michael draws David down to his mouth. The waves can’t drown out the wonder in his voice, either. They are a wonder, the two of them together.

Just them, just the two of them.

David grins, his fangs out, his eyes yellow, just for a flash. “Yes. So what about our David, then?”

“Star–” Michael says awkwardly. He doesn’t want Star. “We were just lonely. We said we’d call it off if one of us found someone.”

“Hmmm.”

He has to ask. It is eating him inside out. “Look, do you want a David or not? Because I found you, and I don’t want anybody else.”

David looks up at him through tired eyes. The sun is coming up, but they’ll be safe under the cliff. His cat’s smile is back. “I don’t want anyone else either.”

Michael swallows. “Right.”

He believes David. 

Doesn’t he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might have noticed explicit confessions of love between insecure piners are my kink.


	8. crossing out the good years

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael holds David. David talks to Michael about the Lost Boys. David talks to Michael about all the things that hurt the most. Michael holds David. Michael and David. David and Michael.
> 
> Sam? What is Sam doing here?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watch me scramble to tie up all the loose ends.

**DAVID**

Michael has to go home before Lucy sends out a search party, but he promises to come back.

“Don’t bother,” David tells him, “I’ll be asleep.” He wraps himself in Michael’s old leather jacket before he drifts off. It doesn’t smell like Michael does anymore, but that’s okay. David himself smells a little bit like Michael.

“When will _I_ ever sleep?” Michael mutters to himself, but when Michael comes back at four in the afternoon, that question is answered. 

In the day, of course. 

“Not very sustainable,” Michael murmurs, pushing his face into David’s neck tiredly. “Not going to work in the long run.”

Something in David’s chest flutters. Michael’s thinking about this as something that will last. Something that he _wants_ to last. 

David wants it to last, too. 

So much.

So much.

They will, won’t they? David doesn’t have anybody else, though Star has opened her door to him. He may have to take her up on it; his back aches after so many days sleeping on the rocks.

“We’ll figure something out,” David assures him. “Don’t college students study all day and party all night? If they can work three hours of sleep, so can we.”

“I don’t know.” Michael yawns. “I haven’t gone to college.”

David yawns too– four in the afternoon is far too early for him to wake up. For Michael, he may make sacrifices, but it doesn’t stifle the drowsiness that sweeps through him. The sunlight doesn’t reach them, but the outside is bright.

“Neither have I.” David runs his fingers through Michael’s hair. It’s so soft and thick, and Michael tilts his head like a dog asking to be scratched. “Take me with you when you go.”

“Yeah,” Michael agrees mindlessly. And then he sits up and looks at David. His tiredness is gone, and with it goes David’s. Why is Michael looking at him like that? “Are you joking, or…?”

“I… I’d like to be where you are.” David wasn’t thinking too hard when he said it. It doesn’t mean he didn’t mean it, but it’s a lot more complicated than _take me_ and _okay._ And it’s true; he wants to be where Michael is. But he doesn’t want to leave, either.

So much more complicated. Not only about the technicalities, but because it’s– Well. Him and Michael– they haven’t promised anything to each other, not really. Have they? They’ve only established that they… 

Hell, _fuck_ , they love each other.

But still, no promises. 

It was just a reckless thing to say.

David has begun to learn Michael, in and out, a language. But He doesn’t miss the way Michael still studies him as if he’s a mystery. And he doesn’t really know how to open the window to his heart and let Michael see inside.

He tries. He does. He’ll try right now. “You know, this boardwalk reminds me so much of the boys.”

Michael’s face softens whenever David mentions the Lost Boys, and he looks sad. He may not enjoy Michael’s sadness, but there’s a drop of satisfaction anyway, at knowing Michael mourns their losses on some level.

David looks to the sea. 

Michael offered to help him find somewhere else, and although sneaking him into the Emerson household and living in secret doesn’t sound appealing, and neither does taking Laddie’s spare room in Star’s apartment, the sea is getting to be a boring sight. He can’t own a place of his own as a vampire. 

“It’s painful to… hunt.”

Michael’s breath sharpens next to him. It’s the silence when Michael’s about to burst out with something. His last outburst was the spark that set them both on fire. David just waits for it.

“Why did you end up blood-deprived anyway?” Michael’s voice is concerned. And a little bit guilty. “You should know– I haven’t made it clear, but I… the way I felt about your hunting. I’ve never thought about any kind of killing being alright unless it’s the bad guys. But I understand that you have to kill to feed.”

David makes a noise. “We were the bad guys, then.”

“I didn’t want to be a vampire. We called the only people we knew who could help.” Michael sounds urgent. “I didn’t want them to kill all of you. You know that? But I’m sorry.”

“You should be.” David rests his chin on his knees and swallows down his memories of the Lost Boys. 

Perhaps the boys would never forgive him for falling in love with Michael Emerson. 

But perhaps Paul and Marko would. They were always more playful and forgiving. And Dwayne was a good judge of character; he’d give David and Michael hell, and when hell was over, he’d welcome Michael so seamlessly you wouldn’t be able to tell Michael had ever not been there.

Perhaps.

Eventually, David concedes lowly, “I understand you, Michael. And I don’t enjoy killing anymore.” He pulls Michael closer. “That night wasn’t your fault, for the most part.”

Michael huffs against David’s neck and presses his warm lips there. “I thought maybe you’d quit for me. Like I guilt-tripped you.”

“You can’t guilt-trip me.” David laughs softly and feels Michael smile. “I’m not that gullible.”

Michael grasps David’s hands and sits up. He likes to look David in the eye when he says important things, Michael does. David likes to look away; it’s easier. But Michael is brave with the little things, and if David isn’t exactly _brave_ he can be _daring_. Michael loves him, and last night, David confessed his love first, looking Michael right in the eyes. He likes to think it felt more magical that way.

Michael seems to like David’s hands; he kisses them almost absently, toying with his fingers. David thinks he might one day build a tolerance, but right now, the gentle path of Michael’s thumb over his knuckles is still a trail of fire. “Do you want to tell me what happened that night?”

Right now, Michael is so utterly human. He has never done and felt the bloody things that David has. He can see the shining wet rocks under his boots when he drops his head and the shape of Michael in the corner of his eye. He closes his eyes.

“I hate losing control,” he begins. “I hurt people, I kill people…”

Michael takes a quiet breath beside him, and David can hear it even over the lapping of the low-tide waves. Vampire senses are a blessing and a curse. 

Michael seems to sense that this is a difficult thing for David, and yet something he wants to talk about, because he simply waits. Michael is such an impatient person, David thinks, but he is waiting now, for David to be ready.

David laughs ruefully, but it comes out almost breathless. “I hadn’t lost control in a very long time,” he confesses. He can hear the soft scrape of rocks against each other and feels Michael settle himself in front of David instead of beside him, but he doesn’t open his eyes. “And now I’ve suddenly lost it twice in a month. Funny how that is.”

Michael is still holding his hand. He asks, “Why?”

David opens his eyes, keeping them low, locked on where their hands are linked. “Why haven't I lost control in a long time? Or why I lost it twice this month?” Both questions are heavy stones of apprehension sitting in his stomach.

“Both,” Michael replies easily, but something must show on David’s face, because he amends, “Either. Neither, if you want.”

“The first one’s easy.” Sort of true. Half true. It’s an easy answer, but hard to say. “It’s… frightening. When you lose control, you can’t think. You can’t want anything but blood. It’s the only thing in your mind, in your heart…” He glances up at Michael, and away. 

Michael is watching him with his dark blue eyes, like the deep blue of the sea, concerned and attentive. His eyelashes are a thing beyond human. 

“When you cut yourself, I thought– I thought I’d come so close to losing control and killing _you_. I came to my senses before then, just barely. It was a close thing, Michael. Closer than it looked to you, I’m sure.”

“And you loved me then, too.”

“God, get over yourself. Go to hell.”

Michael just grins sheepishly, his mouth twitching. David kisses it. Michael is so warm, and his new leather jacket is beginning to smell more like him. David will have to orchestrate a trade when it does.

“The second part?” Michael asks.

“That one’s harder.” David considers. So many different things, so many different feelings that play into why he hadn’t been feeding– or is there at all? Maybe it is really very simple.

So he tells Michael about the Lost Boys.

He doesn’t tell it so that Michael will believe he is a monster, and he doesn’t tell it as if he killed the way he knows Michael wishes he would have– only when he was truly in need of blood; he tells it as it happened.

He tells Michael about the people they would pick out, and how they’d make it fun and loud and wild. He tells Michael about the fights they would pick and the enemies they would make, and how they’d kill them later that night. He tells Michael about how, now and then, they’d choose a gathering of people, a group, and descend on them all like teenage grim reapers, “Only dressed better,” he says. Michael listens to all of this. He tells Michael about how they’d place bets and race to the victims and laugh about it until it was over.

“You have to understand that we had to kill.” David looks at Michael hard. This is the most important thing he will say. “We were not bad people. I don’t believe we were bad people. But when good people– or just, normal people. We were normal people. When normal people have to kill, they feel terrible about it. Michael we– we _did_.

“But think. You… you’re going off to college. And you have to study. You hate studying, right?”

“Of course.”

“Right, you’re not a monster.” David winks, bringing out his fangs just for a second because it always makes Michael smile. “Good for you.”

“Thank you.”

David works out the allegory. “You hate studying, Michael. Studying is the worst. You have to study to pass, but you hate it. But you don’t have a choice. _You have to do it._ Of course, you’re going to find ways to make it fun. You’re going to bring friends, and food, and music, and whatever fucking else. You can’t control whether you do it, and you’d rather not be miserable.”

Michael smiles, then. They’re talking about David killing people and having fun, and Michael is smiling. David thinks he may die. “Misery is less desirable.”

“So we… we made it fun. We hated ourselves afterward. Felt terrible. Paul and Marko’s echoes weren’t always sex– although plenty of them were.” David grins again, and he’s glad to melt the concern off of Michael’s face. His chest goes warm, though, at the way Michael squeezes his hands. “But making it fun helped us get through the night. It kept us alive, and… after decades of it, you get used to it. It _was_ fun. In the moment, it was fun. I’m sorry.”

Michael’s taking this in stride. “Thank you for this,” is all he says. He’s still watching David, listening.

David tips his head up to nuzzle Michael’s neck and is rewarded with warm arms wrapping around him. He should probably be annoyed that Michael treats him so gently, because he isn’t weak, not in the least, but it’s gratifying to lean into someone and be held. 

The Lost Boys didn’t really do that with him; he was their leader and a leader is strong. Of course, they all supported each other, but he never had something quite like this. Like Michael, smelling like sunshine and cologne and a new leather jacket, enveloping him completely. Holding him, and pressing a kiss to his forehead, and waiting, patiently, for David to find his words. No one has _cared for him_ , in the material sense of the words, for a long time. 

He feels eighteen again.

“You can go to the hotel, by the way.” He doesn’t say what it means to him. That he’s letting Michael into a wound that is still raw. That he is trusting Michael not to rub any salt into it. That he is trusting Michael to see part of him that is broken before he is even ready to fix it.

That the magical thing between them is something he’s never let himself give or have with anyone else, and he wants to keep them both just like this. He wants to give all his promises.

He doesn’t say any of that, but he lets the words sit there for a moment, leaning into Michael and feeling Michael’s chest rise and fall with breath. 

Michael’s arms tighten; Michael knows exactly what he means. 

“I’ll get your life savings.”

Michael doesn’t say it either, but then, he doesn’t have to. David can feel him understand.

And so David lets go of trying to hide his broken.

David talks about the Lost Boys being gone. 

About how in the past month, he hasn’t wanted to kill at all; his kill-drive, as you might call it, falling from excitement to dread. There’s no one to make it fun, and now the bright colors they painted over it have washed away. It is black again. It is killing again. It is horrible, and it hurts, and it is lonely and wrong and empty again.

Michael’s fingers trace shapes on David’s back, his hand under David’s jacket but over his shirt. _Choose one_ , David wants to say. _Do you take me or do you not?_

“You hated me for it.”

Micahel’s hand stills. “I didn’t.”

“Please, don’t even try.” David scowls. “You probably went home and threw up in the toilet.”

“He didn’t.”

David and Michael both turn, so fast that Michael falls backward, and David, in Michael’s arms, falls back against Michael’s chest. 

Michael’s chest is satisfyingly firm with muscle, but soft enough, and David feels a slight twinge of pity for Michael, who hits the rocks with a muttered, “Ow.”

It’s the skinny, curly-haired kid. The brother.

A sort of fear trickles down the back of David’s spine. 

This is why the future is such a shaky thing to talk about, to reach out and touch. It is only a painting, yet. 

No, not even. 

Simply an outline, sketched awkwardly in David and Michael’s hands. David and Michael haven’t even learned how to mesh their styles yet, and Sam and Michael’s styles have interwoven for years– and Sam certainly doesn’t want David in the picture; they won’t both fit in the frame.

And Michael certainly fits his style into Sam’s better. They’re both eager and familiar and human. 

“ _Sam_ ,” Michael groans. “What are you doing here?”

“Mom wanted me to come find you,” Sam explains. He looks sheepish, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. He has the _worst_ sense of fashion, as if he’s picked up different pieces of clothing right through cheesy television. “I didn’t know you were talking to your man.”

He isn’t glaring at David, yet.

Maybe he doesn’t recognize David? Yet.

He isn’t screaming or telling David to get away from his brother, yet.

And Michael isn’t getting up and leaving.

Yet.

His arms are still around David, hugging him loosely from behind, though he’s shifted so that David isn’t where he fell– which was, gracelessly, right into Michael’s lap. 

He’s pulling them back, now, awkwardly. David doesn’t want to see what Michael looks like. Embarrassed? Ashamed? So he doesn’t look. 

“Uh,” Michael’s hands clap together in Michael’s lap. His shoulder is still brushing David’s. “You know why Mom wants me?”

Sam Emerson just shrugs. “I dunno. Think she’s worried about you, Mike.” He shrugs a bit like his brother, but he’s skinnier and not nearly as handsome. 

Michael’s hair is darker, his jawline stronger. He’s so handsome, and he’s so strong, and he’s dusting himself off and standing.

And David is watching it happen. 

“Why is she worried about me?” Michael stretches and yawns, just to the side of David’s frame of vision. 

David gets a thin glimpse of Michael’s hip before Michael’s arms drop back down, just a sliver of skin that makes him feel hot all over. David feels more awake as the day nears its end, and he wants to do certain things _right now_. 

It’s not even the nighttime yet, David tells himself, and he should be sleeping. This is Michael’s time– daytime– and since Michael spent most of last night with David, David has stolen Michael away from his normal life, at least for a day. Shouldn’t that be enough? Isn’t Michael allowed to leave him?

But it still feels as if he’s second choice.

He looks up to find Michael’s brother staring at him, a little bit horrified. “Your secret boyfriend looks like he wants to eat you alive,” he informs Michael with a sort of morbid eagerness. “Watch your butt, Mikey.”

“Shut up, Sam. Please shut up.” Micheal sounds both embarrassed and fond, and David can see the flush down the back of Michael’s neck. 

He can feel that he isn’t much better. He should be much too old for the word _boyfriend_ to do things to him, but he should’ve expected Michael would break that rule. Of course, he would. David’s stomach flips warmly, and he’s irrationally pleased that Michael doesn’t rush to clarify that they aren’t _boyfriends_ … even though they aren’t. 

Are they?

Michael turns to look at him, a smile on his face that says both _sorry about that_ and _were you really?_ and the warmth in David increases twofold.

“Where’s Mom?” Michael asks, turning back to Sam and going to him. Walking over. He passes the point where the cliff above them casts its shadow and squints into the sunlight. 

And then he walks into it.

“Help me find her.”

David pulls Michael’s jacket tighter, drawing his knees to his chest– Michael is so warm, and he feels cold now. He’s going to try to sleep, he decides. He’s not going to keep thinking about Michael’s warm skin and peeking hipbone, and the way he’s flushed bright red every time David looks at him after they kiss. 

Hell. Kissing Michael is still so new, but David is learning it. David is learning it and studying it just like he is the rest of Michael, trying to commit him all to memory.

Not because he’s not sure how long Michael will be there.

No, that’s not why.

Sam’s walking into the shade, sauntering, almost. He has the worst sort of sweepy coat on, too thin to be warm and too gray to be a statement. Black or bright is the way to go. 

“I’m going to give him the brother talk,” he tells Michael. David glares at Sam and unfolds himself, trying to look as unfriendly as possible. “Mom doesn’t need _me_.”

Michael blinks back, nonplussed. “What? Come with me, Sam.”

Sam shakes his head. David bares his teeth at Sam– just his human teeth, that is– and Sam lights up. “I’m staying here. Will you show me your fangs?”

So Sam Emerson has recognized him after all. David just wants to sleep. Michael is leaving and he wants to sleep, so he drops his fangs down and hisses at Sam, letting his eyes and features change with them. His talons scratch against the rocks loudly as he pushes off of them and stands over Sam.

Sam’s eyes are wide, but he doesn’t back away. “You’re a full one, aren’t you?” 

David almost groans out loud. Sam looks more intrigued than anything, as if he’s now certain he can take on any creature of the night and isn’t frightened, not even with David before him, fully changed. 

“You were a vampire, and now you’re _dating_ a vampire.” He’s grinning at Michael, who’s watching them with a flat expression, though his mouth is beginning to turn up. “Goddammit, Michael.”

Michael smiles. _Oh no_. 

“Michael, take your brother,” David demands, but it’s too little, too late. “I’m not suffering through the company of this murderer.”

“Hey, look who’s talking!” Sam crosses his arms. “You and I are going to have a chat about your boyfriend, you shit-sucker.” 

If he’s trying to be intimidating, it’s not working.

Michael picks his way back over the rocks to David, back in the shade, and cups David’s face, drawing him into a gentle kiss. It isn’t anything past PG, and it’s as sweet as can be, but David feels weak in the knees from it all the same. 

Michael’s kissing David right in front of Sam– he might as well be saying _I still choose you_. He hopes that’s what Michael’s saying, he hopes so. He presses back and closes his eyes, savoring the tender way Michael holds his face in his warm hands.

And then Michael’s off to leave Sam with David–

Alone. 

And certainly, that last thing David wants to do is spend time with Sam Emerson of the horrible fashion taste and Dwayne’s death, but he’s almost glad of it. Michael isn’t afraid of David at all, because for all the things he _can_ do and _has done_ , somehow Michael trusts him all the same. 

Michael. David watches him until he’s out of sight, over the bluffs.

“If you hurt my brother, I’m staking you.”

David looks down at Sam Emerson, who is staring him down with comical intensity, and drops himself down unceremoniously on his ledge of rock. “I’d like that.” He grins up at Sam, letting his eyes go yellow and his teeth come back out again, glaring. “It would give me an excuse to kill you.”

Sam looks taken aback for a moment, and then he sits down too, criss-cross, elbows on his knees. 

“Sorry about the Native guy,” he says, the way people do when they have no idea what they’re talking about. There are people who pretend to be sympathetic, and there are people who are perfectly frank about not understanding your loss, David learned, when his father died way back when. Sam’s the second type. 

David doesn’t acknowledge the apology, but he says, “Dwayne.” 

David wonders if all the Emersons are apologizers. The Lost Boys always had caps on their apologies. Only _this much_ remorse was ever expressed, and now, suddenly, David’s gotten apologies from two people he openly attacked.

“You won’t kill me, will you?” Sam sounds so confident about it. “Michael would hate you if you did. I get protection, right?”

David ignores this and lies back. He can sleep through this– he used to sleep through Marko and Paul yelling and playing with fire and jumping all over the place all the time. David closes his eyes against the sun and tries to sleep, pulling his talons in and letting his human features come back. 

Sam sighs somewhere slightly above him and to the left. He’s probably still staring.

“You know…”

“Will you shut your mouth, little Emerson?”

“You’re wearing Michael’s jacket, man.” A rock skitters. Sam must be skipping them on the stones. “I knew he gave it to his boyfriend. And I promised him I’d like you.” 

David wants to turn away from Sam and sleep facing the inside of the cliff, but he’s tried that already. “I hope to break your promise, then.” Something hits his knee. “Fuck you,” David growls, pushing himself up on his arm and snatching a stone off the ground. 

He hurls it at Sam and hits Sam’s shoulder.

“ _Ow_ ,” Sam yells, clapping a hand over his shoulder. “I didn’t hit you that hard, you fucker!”

David doesn’t call his talons this time; they just come out, screeching against the rock as he pushes up, leaning close to Sam. This time, Sam backs away. “How hard did you hit Dwayne?”

“I’m sorry, man!” Sam scrambles backward. “Jesus Christ!”

David’s fangs have come out too; they prick the inside of his lip, and he tastes blood for a moment, but the wound heals itself in the blink of an eye. “You should be sorrier,” David growls.

“Sorrier!” Sam agrees, crossing his fingers in front of him, “Way sorrier, dude!” He reaches the sunlight and stands in it, panting, his eyes wide. David won’t hurt him and Michael knows that, but for all his bravado, Sam doesn’t seem to.

Sam looks terrified. “Come on, Vampire,” he wheedles. “I don’t want to make Michael choose. Do you?”

David takes a breath, and another.

Sam looks terrified.

Dwayne would never forgive him if he made friends with this kid. Neither would the other boys. But they’re not here to meet Sam. They’re not here to grow and change and learn… and if David could reach back in time and show them, _remind_ them how valuable human life is, how valuable _humans_ are, they might become people who could someday forgive him of this.

Couldn’t they?

He doesn’t want to make Michael choose either. He’s not sure who would win, but in the dark, in the very back of his mind, he’s almost certain it won’t be him. 

“Why not?” He makes sure to look down at Sam, but Sam doesn’t seem bothered by it. He grins nervously, as if pleased David is talking at all.

“ _Dude_.” Sam gives him a look. _Are you dumb?_ “He’s really into you.”

 _Is he?_ What a stupid question. Michael _confessed his love_. Just thinking about it brings blood up to David’s face, though less. He hasn’t fed in almost twenty-four hours, and though he won’t get hungry for another twenty-four, he won’t blush. But he’s blushing now.

Fucking _Michael._

David grins, fangs out. “It isn’t his fault,” he croons. “Vampires have–” He snaps his fingers. “–tricks.”

Sam frowns, and he backs up more, as if to be absolutely sure he’s in the sunlight. He is. “You’re _not_.” He looks disturbed. “You _wouldn’t_. You like him, don’t you? And that wouldn’t be real.”

Oddly enough, the surprise on his face is what makes David drop his hand. What is it with Emersons and believing people are better than they are? David wouldn’t enthrall Michael, he would _never_. But it’s still overly optimistic to believe he would _never ever._

He wouldn’t, though. 

He’s thinking himself in circles. 

“I’m not, and I wouldn’t,” he admits. “And… I do.”

“Good.” Sam nods to himself. “That’s good.”

David swallows. He’s just standing there now, him and Michael Emerson’s brother, who’s trying not to hate him for Michael. David could do that too, if he wanted to. 

He imagines Dwayne flipping him off and jumping on his bike for a furious ride, the way he would when he got upset. Maybe lighting something on fire. David picked that up from Dwayne; before, he wouldn’t go near a fire. Fires burned vampires so quickly. But Dwayne wasn’t afraid, and David had to be at least as brave as Dwayne if he wanted to be king under Max. He did want to be king. So he learned to set fires and smoke cigarettes, and Dwayne had burned to death, pinned by an arrow through his heart.

“How much?”

David realizes he’s running his fingers behind his ear, where he usually keeps a cigarette, and he drops his hand. “How much what.”

“How much do you like him?” Sam is as incessant as Star; they should hang out. Better Star than David. “Like enough to not kill him, right?”

David doesn’t even know where to start on that one. No fucking _shit_ he likes Michael enough not to kill him. “Five,” he says.

“Five?” 

David raises his eyebrows and doesn’t say anything. 

“Five what? Five out of five? Five out of ten? Five out of a hundred? Five percent chance you’ll kill him? Five percent chance you _won’t_ kill him?” Sam runs his breath short before he stops. “Number five vampire?”

Sam really could go toe to toe with Star.

“I’m not going to hurt your brother,” David swears. “I wouldn’t.” It’s like deja vu but with light hair and scrawnier.

Sam seems to consider this, and make a decision. “David, right?” He seems to take David’s silence as agreement. “I heard your whole villain sympathy speech.”

David kicks a rock so that it hits Sam’s ankle. He feels suddenly off-balance, the presence he likes to cast suddenly threatened, driven into hiding, as if it was only a shirt he wore and Sam has stolen it. “About killing? That speech?”

At least Sam has the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, well. I wasn’t expecting him to be talking to his secret boyfriend, you know.” He sounds earnest, as if this is the sort of thing David would relate to. “It didn’t sound like something I was supposed to interrupt.”

“Or hear at all.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I should kill you right now,” David mutters. “No witnesses.”

Sam Emerson laughs. “I’m saying you’re not a monster, that’s all. I think I understand you guys now!”

What David wouldn’t give for the simplistic mind like that. “Not even close, Sam. Are you done with the interview?”

“One more question.” Sam grins. “Do you want to be friends?” He seems proud of the line– more than that, he really seems to mean it. 

No. David doesn’t, not really. 

But he thinks about Michael, and making Michael choose. Or even making Michael keep them separate, always careful to make sure they never overlap. 

And he thinks about Sam, who, for all his friendliness, is still clearly wary that David will steal his brother away, either by Turning him or killing him, and who is evidently trying to trust where Michael puts his heart.

He thinks of Dwayne, and how aside from Star, Dwayne was the one who took care of Laddie the most. He always seemed good with children, to _like_ them, even though he’d probably sock David for thinking it. 

He closes his eyes and apologizes to his boys for Sam and Michael Emerson.

But he chooses to believe that they would have come to forgive David for loving Michael, and Michael himself, and even Sam, if they were still alive. If they had time.

He puts his hands in the pockets of Michael’s jacket and he nods.

Sam steps into the shade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soft? I am soft. I am the softest.


	9. we gather here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael loves Santa Carla, and he loves everyone there. Lucy, Sam, Star.
> 
> And David. God, David. He really loves David.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter!! This was so fun. This was too fun. I had way too much fun with this.

**MICHAEL**

David’s smoke-and-blood taste still lingers on Michael’s mouth as he goes to find his mom, but it must be the flush on his cheeks that gives him away.

Or perhaps the fact that he can’t stop grinning.

Or maybe, _maybe_ , the bandage still on his neck, and the fact that Lucy doesn’t believe Star– who Michael _did_ admit to breaking up with– had her period all over Michael’s pillow.

Whatever the case may be, she is not believing him for a moment. 

“Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to keep guessing?” She touches the bandage on his neck. “Don’t you know anything, Michael? You need to _change_ the bandage sometimes.”

“Give me your best guess, Mom.” Michael lets himself be led to their bathroom, which has since been cleaned of Paul’s blood. He still feels strange going into the bathroom where Paul died to clean up a neck wound of all things. A neck _bite_. “And let me clean this up on my own. I’ll have to learn how sometime, right?”

His mom frowns, getting out anti-itch and anti-bacteria ointments from the cabinet. “Not unless you’re planning on getting scraped often. I have my suspicions, Michael. But I would rather you tell me the truth, you know.”

His mom can be so _guilt-trippy_ sometimes, and yet not really. It certainly trips him up with guilt, but she isn’t doing it on purpose. Most of the time.

“I don’t think you could guess it if you tried.” 

“If I tried?” Lucy rummages through the cabinets, apparently looking for bandages. Michael’s not bleeding anymore, but he supposes mother knows best. “I dated a vampire, Michael. I have a wider world than you might think.”

Michael tries not to react in any way. 

Lucy, of course, notices. 

Mothers notice these sort of things, she’d told Michael once, but then she was always saying that sort of thing, always trying to be everything her boys needed. Sometimes, Michael had snapped at her once, what they needed more than anything was to learn how to stand on their own two legs.

Lucy, bandages in hand, looks him up and down, her lips pursed. Michael knows better than to interrupt her thoughts– she’s more likely to form a more lenient opinion if given more time. If not, she feels rushed and chooses _no_ , in an effort to be more safe than sorry.

Sons know these things, but Michael and Sam never told her. It’s not the sort of thing any smart son would tip their mother off about. 

“I’m not surprised,” she admits eventually. “I thought about it a few times, you know. What with you coming home so late? Star wouldn’t keep you that long, because I _know_ you didn’t like her quite like that.” 

She points at him before Michael can open his mouth. “Don’t even try it, young man. I know you. I just thought all the Santa Carla vampires were dead? What, are there more?” She looks at Michael hard. “Or– does the empty grave by the tree have something to do with your neck?”

Michael rips off the bandage and lets her fuss over him. She hasn’t yelled his head off yet, although she takes in a sharp breath and gives him a stern look when she catches sight of the two punctures. 

“No, no more vampires.” Michael bites his lip; cleaning the wound stings. “I didn’t think you noticed the grave.”

“I’m not blind like your grandfather,” Lucy tuts. “But I did originally think it was just raccoons.” She dabs him dry and smooths on the ointment. “I hope the bite was fully consensual and safe.”

Michael’s face burns. “Mom, stop.”

“Is he hurting you? The vampire? What was his name…”

“David.” Michael’s face, though he hadn’t thought it possible, gets even hotter. “He’s not hurting me. And he won’t, I promise. You have to promise you won’t hurt him either. Not you or Grandpa.”

“Hmm.” Lucy presses the gauzy white bandages on next, much better than Michael had managed the first time. “I suppose if you love him.”

Michael swallows, feeling the healed over spot on his neck ache just the slightest bit.

The first time, Michael had been rushed and tired, his fingers clumsy with lightheaded lack of blood. He had been just barely realizing he was in love, and now it seems like a given. Of course, he is. And it’s only been a few days since then, but the feeling been pumped out from his heart until it fills every inch of him. He loves David. Fuck, so much.

He’d had to figure out where the bandages were, getting blood on the counters and being distantly reminded of Paul, but even then, it was David still on his mind. David’s mouth on his neck and his earring brushing against Michael’s collarbone as he drank. 

He hadn’t… minded. No, he really hadn’t. 

If David had been more aware of himself and more careful, and if Michael hadn’t taken a knife to himself, he would have even enjoyed giving David something he needed so badly, and something that David felt so bad about taking. David wouldn’t kill Michael, and there would be no reason for guilt then.

He had even enjoyed it the first time, though of course, it had hurt quite a lot.

But if they were careful about it…

He would do it again. He would do it again every night. 

Michael resists the urge to ask why their Grandpa has full-on medical bandages in stock in the first place. Santa Carla is a wild place, and he couldn’t be more glad they came here.

Fuck, he’s thinking about David again. David’s odd love for this boardwalk, and all the memories he’s tied to it. David has been here for longer than Michael has been alive, and today, when David spoke of it, his words alone made Michael ache. 

David is anchored in this place, rooted in this world, and sometimes Michael feels as if he is walking carefully through the chambers of David’s heart: the good, the bad, and the bloody. The painful and the bittersweet, and, Michael hopes, the just sweet. 

The beach where David would make his wild kills with the boys and the store full of comic books that David hates, the hotel way down under that David loves and isn’t ready to go back to yet and the apartment at the top of the Seaside Cove that David has declared with a slightly peeved expression he has no desire to be in, the boardwalk where the Lost Boys would traipse about in glorious carelessness and the video store that’s dark now and David likes to graffiti dicks on the window of late into the night when everyone is asleep, all of it, all of it.

 _Santa Carla, Murder Captial of the World._

Even without his royal court, Santa Clara is David’s kingdom.

“Mom,” Michael says carefully. “Do you think… do you think there are any good colleges in Santa Carla?”

Lucy’s face fills with understanding, and her eyes go wide and watery. “Michael. My Michael. Do you really feel that way?”

Certain. About David. Certain enough to make a decision like that, to stay in this wide-awake town where people get lost and are never found again. Is Michael sure? Does he want that?

He remembers wanting to fall– and perhaps by then he had already fallen. He remembers David daring him to pinpoint just when, exactly, he fell in love and finds he can’t do it; David was right. 

Michael is both lost and found in David, and he doesn’t want to find his way out.

“Yeah,” he clears his throat. It doesn’t hurt too bad. “I do.”

Lucy brushes her eyes briskly and kisses his forehead. “Oh, honey. You can go to college wherever you like. No matter what college you choose, you get what you give.”

“Mom.” Michael’s eyes sting. “You’re such a fucking hippie.”

Star is radiant when Michael visits her. Laddie isn’t there. 

“I’m glad, Michael. I’m so glad you and David have each other.” She’s blushing and beaming, though, and Michael finally gets it out of her that she found the _missing_ ad for Laddie and got him home to his family. Laddie’s brother, it turns out, is quite something.

“Bring him around sometime,” Michael makes her promise to. “Then David will learn to keep his hands off. My mother sent me to invite you and David both. I’m not so sure about it.”

Star shakes her head, smiling. “I will.” 

Neither of them talks about how she’s got a man in the blink of an eye, and Michael’s disastrous love story took a month and a handful of days, a near-death blood deprivation drunkenness, several arguments, and a fire to settle into something steady. Still, she’s smiling at him with half of her mouth, and he knows she’s thinking about it. 

She leans against the doorway as he leaves. “Does he have a place to stay?”

Michael thinks of Sam, staying behind to make friends with David, even though Michael could tell from the way Sam’s shoulders pulled in that it might’ve been one of the hardest things Sam had ever done. Sam hated David for Turning Michael without telling him, maybe even more than Michael himself. That’s what brothers are for, after all.

And Michael thinks of his mother, taking it all in stride even though they never tell her what’s going on, willing, somehow, to believe in Michael, if not David yet. 

Michael. Way back what feels like forever ago, and is little over a week, if he counts. _Stay with me, then. Stay at our place._

David. Honest without his careful filter, tired and bloodless. _I don’t want to be anywhere else._

“I think he does,” he says. “But I’ll ask.”

“Michael,” she says before he leaves. “He doesn’t want me. You know that, don’t you?”

Maybe Michael knows more of David than Star does now, but they know different parts of him, so he gives in. “I’m one person Star. Is that enough?”

Star smiles. “For David? You’re the world to him. I think he nearly killed me in jealousy when he came here.” She ruffles Michael’s hair, and Michael has to set it to rights.

“You’re such a mom.”

“Then listen to me like one,” Star says. She’s incessant. She is making sure he understands. “He’ll make friends, but _loves you_ like no one else. You’re _enough_.” 

Michael kisses her cheek.

And he leaves to visit the place of the people David loved before.

The hotel is full of things that must be memories, but they aren’t Michael’s memories. It’s nostalgic to be down here, thinking of eating Chinese and drinking from a jewel-encrusted wine-bottle that isn’t wine at all, but it is not stifling or unbearable. 

This doesn’t mean it is not heartbreaking.

The walls have all sorts of pin-ups on them: old photographs, ticket stubs and posters, bumper stickers and thin silver chains. There is no closure here, no sign that the Lost Boys ever though they might not come back, only a faint layer of dust and silty, sandy dirt that has scattered in strong winds.

There is the fountain that Paul danced on and the chair that David stretched himself across like a cat on a throne, the place strewn with trinkets. 

There is the bed that Michael joined Star in and later carried Laddie out of, and there is a curtain around it that he doesn’t push back.

Some ways down, there is a tunneling path that leads to where the boys would sleep, upside down like bats and side by side like brothers. 

Michael doesn’t go in there.

There are memories here, his memories, and they do not even touch the tip of the iceberg; they are only the aerial view. 

Someday, he hopes, David will bring him here and he will tell him about it, but Michael will wait for that day, because David will need time.

For now, he doesn’t know what certain objects mean to David, so he only takes what he knows.

David’s gloves bring back a dozen memories.

And David’s coat smells just like him.

David is on the edge of the cliff he had been sitting under a few hours ago when Michael gets back, the sun having set and leaving the sky a pure black, full of twinkling stars. No moon tonight, but David still shines, somehow, as if outlined by his own light: the light blond hair, his twinking earring, the pale lines of his throat as he tips his head up to look at the stars.

Michael doesn’t even want to talk to him just yet. 

He wants to stare and drink David in like art. If only he could draw, he would draw this: David, just David, alone with his feet hanging off of the edge of the cliff carelessly, looking both young and timeless at once, fearless of the drop and yet weightless, in the middle of the frame. If Michael could do art, he would find his own style, one that matched David and only David, a color palette of the deepest night and the brightest star, the blue of David’s eyes and of the sea.

Sam is there, too. He looks like a very normal person who Michael loves very much, but he is not magic.

Sam spots Michael first. 

“David,” he whispers conspiratorially. “Don’t look now, but Michael’s looking at you like he wants to marry you.”

It sweeps through Michael in a rush. _God_ , Sam should shut his mouth and Michael should slow down– he promises himself he won’t even think about it for at _least_ another year– but Sam isn’t wrong.

“I think I will look now,” David’s soft voice says, and David turns to watch Michael come up. Watching Michael, watching Michael, watching. 

His eyes are less the blue of ice and more like the running water of a stream, ancient as the water cycle and young with the snowmelt.

Michael holds out his full arms when he gets there and sets them on the ground. “Your fucking clothes aren’t in the hotel anymore,” he says. 

He means _here, have this_. He means _I’ve been thinking of you_. He means _I hope we can regain the balance of your life together, bit by bit._ He says, “Your coat smells like you.” David doesn’t blush– perhaps he hasn’t fed recently enough– but Michael can tell he’s flustered and pleased all the same.

Sam wrinkles his nose. “Gross, Mikey. Stop fantasizing about my friend.”

Michael raises his eyebrows and looks between them. 

David shrugs. “I like your brother, Michael.”

“That is so unfair,” he grumbles. “Did you bring him offerings every night, like you were worshipping a goddamn Greek god? No.”

Sam laughs, smiling wide. “I’m going to tell mom you’ll be late for dinner.” He wanders back down to the boardwalk.

Michael looks out at the lights on the ripples of the sea. It’s the same water they looked at when he first kissed David, and when David first confessed his love and when Michael confessed it back.

There isn’t the bright spot of the moon, now. It’s the stars. The bright stars are all over, lighting up more than a single spotlight.

“Give me your jacket,” David murmurs, “And you can wear mine.”

“You have my jacket.” Michael turns away from the water and fingers David’s collar. David is beautiful. David has always been so beautiful.

“I want this one.” David tugs on the one Michael’s wearing. “This one doesn’t smell like you anymore.”

“I’ll wear yours,” Michael agrees. “Even though it’s nothing like mine.”

David smiles and slips off his jacket. Michael’s jacket. If they keep switching them around like this, it will be _their_ jacket soon. 

“How did Sam win you over so easily?”

David ducks his head down a little, into the collar of Michael’s jacket. He is still again, and his fingers tap against each other. “He was telling me about his comic books,” he murmurs as Michael takes his hands. 

David’s hands are cool to the touch and spindly. David smirks a little, and Michael knows David has noticed Michael likes his hands.

“There’s actually a comic book in the series where the vampire does something and weans himself off of blood. He becomes human. It’s just a story, but…” David shrugs. He’s _still_ not hitting casual. Michael thinks they should just give up. “Sam’s looking into it.” 

Michael feels as if the world has stopped on its axis– but time goes on. Santa Carla roars and shouts, bonfires pop and crackle. 

It is Michael and David who are frozen in amber for this one moment.

“David do you–” Michael’s voice cracks. He is fire and midnight and the water on the shores, he is _everything_ that David has ever been a part of, falling in to fill every part of David that needs to be filled. “Do you want that?”

David looks Michael in the eye. He looks afraid. He looks brave. “To grow with you? I want nothing more.” 

His face is young. Michael could believe he is human already– and if the comic book turns out to just be a story, he’s not sure he would mind so much. Perhaps it is enough to know that David would.

“David,” he says. His voice is shaking. His hands are shaking. All of him is shaking. “David.” 

He kisses David.

Blood and sugar-sweet and smoke, David’s cold hands on him and his lean body tangled in Michael’s, his open mouth and his earring against Michael’s cheek. 

A rushing, open sea of feeling in Michael, a roaring, fearless fire in Michael, both surviving at once, magical and impossible. 

Love is everything at once. 

This is love.

David pulls him close enough for Michael to feel the slow, slow beat of David’s vampire heart against the pounding in his own chest.

“My Mom knows about you,” he murmurs into David’s mouth, unwilling to stop kissing him, and kissing him, and kissing him. “She says I can go to college here in Santa Carla.”

“You want that.” It’s too breathless to be a question or a statement; it is an echo of the sentiment. “Here, with everything?”

“With you,” Michael tells him. “Santa Carla has… my family. Sam, my mom, and grandpa. It has Star, and her boyfriend, who you can kill if he’s mean to Star. And it’s your place, you know.”

“Santa Carla, Murder Capital of the World,” David repeats. “This town.”

“Yes, this town.” Michael puts his arm around David’s waist and turns them away from the sea, pointing. David leans into him. “The boardwalk, your land. The beach, your beach. The hotel, yours and your boys’. Paul and Marko and Dwayne are here, and you belong with them. And Star’s, and our place, right here.”

“Our place, the rocky undercliff?” David sounds amused, but so happy. Michael is so happy. He is so happy, he would not change a single thing. 

“I thought of it as a cove.”

“Romantic.”

“This whole place.” Michael waves his hand, sweeping Santa Carla. “It’s yours. And I–”

“Don’t say it.”

“I’m yours.”

David hits him, but Michael doesn’t mind. He can’t be bothered to mind over everything that is right. David’s eyes are bright and blue, and he is smiling a helpless smile, all of eighteen years old, teenage lovers by the sea.

Michael laughs, and David is kissing him again, his cold hands slipping up Michael’s neck, Michael’s hands sliding beneath David’s jacket and shirt. The lean shape of him and the two little circles on his chest, just a little smoother, the soft stubble against his cheeks and the soft hair at the waist of David’s leather pants. “I was thinking you could stay with me, in my room,” he says, rushed and out of breath.

David’s hands go low. “Well, I’ll bet my bike I know why it suddenly became relevant.”

“ _Hey_ –”

David kisses his protest away. “I’ll stay with you if you say something else sickeningly sweet.” He’s smiling against Michael, his eyes tender when he pulls back and looks at him.

“I’m yours for as long as you want.” Michael cups his face. “I mean it.”

“Your whole fucking life, Michael.”

God, the way David says his name.

_Your whole fucking life._

Michael can’t help his smile.

“Come on, then,” he says. “Dinnertime. I think we’re having Chinese.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "we gather here" is about how everyone is here in Santa Carla. And, because I'm soft, it's also the first line of the song. Consider this a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this (even though it's not a heartbreaker). Happy birthday, Blue!! ILY ❤️


End file.
